Hardware sizing for a streaming server deployment

These guidelines can help you determine the quantity and specification of servers that you need to meet your discovery requirements in a streaming server deployment. These guidelines do not apply to an environment where TADDM is running on the Linux® for System z® operating system.

These guidelines are the minimum specifications for hardware sizing. Several factors, including the number of users, can affect server use.

The size of a deployment is defined in terms of the number of server equivalents (SEs).
  • Small deployment: Less than 2,000 SEs
  • Large deployment: 2,000 - 10,000 SEs
  • Enterprise deployment: More than 10,000 SEs
Note: When you run a TADDM server on virtualized hardware, use dedicated (static) resources. Shared (dynamic) resources might cause performance problems.
Use the following general guidelines:
  • Use a fast multiprocessor system for the TADDM servers.
  • Using a small number of faster processors is generally a better solution than using a large number of slower processors. For example, a 4-way 3.6 GHz Intel implementation is preferable to an 8-way 2.0 GHz Intel implementation.
  • DB2® and Oracle databases that TADDM uses are configured to take advantage of multiple processors and parallel operations.
  • For a streaming server deployment, which is a single database system, run the database on a dedicated database server.

These guidelines assume that the TADDM server and the database server are on separate systems.

The following options are examples of how you can scale your TADDM environment as needed:
  • Horizontally, by increasing the size, capacity, or both, of an individual component. For example, to run more discovery worker threads on a single discovery server, you might want to increase the number of processors from two to four.
  • Vertically, by adding additional components to your deployment. For example, if you have a data center in the USA, Europe, and Japan, you might want to place a discovery server at each location.

Disk space

To ensure that sufficient space is available for the TADDM installation and logging information, disk space requirements are provided. Alternatively, you can use the supplied formulas to estimate disk space requirements, paying particular attention to considerations such as growth, TADDM logging, and database logging.

Memory size

A discover worker thread is a thread that runs sensors. For a streaming server deployment, 64-bit hardware is required for all storage servers and discovery servers that use more than 24 concurrent discover worker threads. This also implies a 64-bit operating system and Java™ virtual machine. For large and enterprise deployments, a 64-bit version of the database software is required also.

Processor speed

The following table outlines the baseline processor types by platform.
Table 1. Baseline processor types
Platform Baseline processor type
Intel Xeon
pSeries Power6
Sun (Oracle) Sparc

You can compare other processor types by using industry standard benchmark data that is available from The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) at http://www.spec.org/.