Performance Evaluation of a Commercial Application, Trade, in Scale-out Environments

Scale-out approach, in contrast to scale-up approach (exploring increasing performance by utilizing more powerful shared-memory servers), refers to deployment of applications on a large number of small, inexpensive, but tightly packaged and tightly interconnected servers. The purpose of this study is to understand the performance of scale-out architectures with a typical enterprise workload, IBM Trade Performance Benchmark Sample for WebSphere Application Server (a.k.a. Trade). We describe a performance evaluation methodology that gives accurate predictions of application performance and system utilization by utilizing experimental data driven model development. Through experiments and extrapolation from the derived model, we show that for such workload, WebSphere Application Server packages for distributed environments scale well while the possible bottleneck of the application deployment is the database tier.