Want to get DB2 pureScale at an Affordable Price?

Last year, IBM released the pureScale feature for DB2, which allows you to create shared-disk clusters for database transaction processing. One of the great things about DB2 pureScale is that it provides near linear scale-out efficiency, which means that when you add a node to the cluster, you almost get a full node worth of additional processing power. In other words, the overhead involved in coordinating cluster activities for DB2 pureScale is relatively small.

Of course, this is in contrast to Oracle RAC, where there are numerous public accounts of poor scale-out performance. Although, to be fair, many of those Oracle RAC horror stories are probably due to people not making their applications cluster-aware, or due to people not having the skills to properly tune those systems. In other words, if you are willing to spend enough time and money, I reckon a lot of those Oracle RAC systems can achieve reasonable scale-out-efficiency. Of course, with DB2 pureScale, you don’t have to worry about any of that. With DB2 pureScale, you simply add or remove nodes as you please. The DB2 pureScale approach does not require that your applications be cluster-aware, and does not require complex tuning. DB2 pureScale actually delivers on the promise of being truly application transparent.

Okay, that’s enough background information… on to the actual subject of the blog post. A few months ago, IBM made DB2 pureScale available on x86 servers. That was a big first step towards making DB2 pureScale clusters more affordable. And last week, IBM took another big step in that direction by announcing that DB2 pureScale is now included in DB2 Workgroup Server Edition. DB2 Workgroup Server Edition is our mid-range offering with a list price of $15k per socket.

This means that, for instance, you could purchase a couple of these $15k DB2 Workgroup Server Edition licenses for use with two x86-based servers, each of which has one socket with 4 CPU cores. You could then create a 2-node cluster, where each node has a hefty 4 CPU cores. You would enjoy the great performance of DB2, as well as the continuous availability offered by DB2 pureScale. And all this for a very good price (that is subject to standard software discounts).

DB2 pureScale and DB2 Workgroup Server Edition offer a great alternative to running Oracle RAC for small clusters. Not only is the IBM combination attractive from a pricing standpoint, it is also attractive from a performance and subsequent ease of scaling standpoint.