Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Powering the World’s First Big Data Benchmark Results with Cisco

Red Hat and Cisco have a long history of offering joint solutions that benefit our mutual customers and address a gamut of IT challenges, from server sprawl to cloud computing. Both companies consistently foster technological innovation and work towards breaking new ground in computing, including a history of driving world-record performance across a wide range of industry-standard benchmarks.

Industry standard performance benchmarking, driven by groups like TPC and SPEC, goes all the way back to 1988. Many of these benchmarks have driven the development of faster, cheaper, and more efficient computer technologies over the course of the past quarter century.

With over a hundred of benchmark records to its name, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is known to power some of the most

extreme, innovative, and cutting edge configurations. Cisco has recently published a summary of 100 record-breaking benchmark results set by their Unified Computing System (UCS) since the inception of that product line. Red Hat Enterprise Linux was used in over one-third of these results, demonstrating the strength of our collaboration and its evolution over the past five years (see chart below), and confirming that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a platform of choice for top performance results.

Nothing is constant, however, and enterprise IT is moving far beyond the realms governed by these traditional benchmarks and into more complex use cases, including big data and analytics. To keep up with the changing role of IT, TPC recently released the TPC Express Benchmark HS (TPCx-HS), the new standard benchmark for big data systems. Not surprisingly, Cisco was the first company ever to publish TPC Express Benchmark HS results across three scale factors: 1TB, 3 TB and 10TB (see table below).

These results were conducted using Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for big data running an operating system built for the rigors of extreme, “non-traditional” computing: Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is another example of both companies using their best technologies and know-how to achieve record-setting benchmark results.

However, Red Hat Enterprise Linux isn’t just a platform for over-the-top, extreme benchmarking. We feel that these results also highlight the capabilities of the platform to run enterprise workloads. From the server room to the data center to the R&D lab, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is able to both meet the IT needs of today and scale to meet the most intense computing demands of tomorrow.

SPEC is a registered trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. For more information about SPEC and its benchmarks see: www.spec.org. TPCx-HS and TPC are trademarks of the Transaction Performance Processing Council (TPC). For more information see: www.tpc.org. Results as of January 12, 2015.