POWER7 stats

I parsed and munged SpecJBB2005 data to get some interesting information about performance of various hardware platforms on JDK 1.6. A couple of things are interesting:

1) POWER7 is the mainstream performance champ. There are some oddball Nehalem contenders from Fujitsu and Cisco. In general though, the POWER 780 kicks some tail and the 750 isn't far behind. (There are no data from the 770.)

2) Performance data from one 780 running AIX is very different from another 780 running System i. This has to do with the quirky little JVM for System i, I think.

3) The top 16 performers on a BOPS/core basis are all running the IBM J9 JVM. JRockit doesn't show up until 17. Of the top 30, 28 use the J9 JVM. This tells me that IBM has really caught up with the BEA guys in terms of JDK performance.

Yay me!

My company was asked to pursue a new IBM certification focused on cloud computing topics. The new certification requires passing the 000-032 cert test. I passed on Sunday, 35 minutes after the test was made available to IMPACT attendees. (The test is not yet available on Prometric.)

That makes me the first person in the universe to have passed the exam. I am now a Certified Solution Adviser - Cloud Computing Architecture, v1. Yay.

The test covers a broad spectrum of cloud topics, from IBM's productized cloud offerings (Lotus Live, TPM, etc) as well as a bunch of content on SAAS, PAAS, and IAAS, cloud methodologies, and business benefits for public, private, and virtual private cloud topologies.

WXS In A Box?

The Zealot is out in Vegas for the annual IMPACT conference. One of the more interesting product announcements (other than WXS 7.1) is the DataPower XC10. It appears to be a product of the eXtreme Scale product dev team (thanks Joe Lea!).

Short version: the XC10 provides a pure-play implementation of WXS technology with 160 GB of storage. Reading between the lines, WXS disk offload clearly works, and this device will handle DynaCache, session cache, and "web cache" (including Hibernate near-line) for your web app server environment.

I'm impressed. Outlying questions:

1) Is this thing as hardened as the XA35-XM70 appliances? They do very different things, and WXS has always been Java-based. That's a far cry from a pure ASIC-implementation of XML acceleration.

2) Speaking of Java, does this thing use a near-realtime JVM? Deterministic performance (meaning predictable) is very much key for caching at the high end.

3) How competitive is the XC10 versus Azul's bad-boy Java appliances?

More to come.