ADDENDUM TO: BENCHMARK TESTING RESULTS UNPARALLELED SCALABILITY OF ITRON ENTERPRISE EDITION ON SQL SERVER

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1 ADDENDUM TO: BENCHMARK TESTING RESULTS UNPARALLELED SCALABILITY OF ITRON ENTERPRISE EDITION ON SQL SERVER EMC Information Infrastructure provides the foundation Essentials Itron and Microsoft reached 37,500 meter reads per second with 10 million meters running on EMC infrastructure EMC employed its 1st strategy to maximize storage performance and efficiency while minimizing cost EMC FAST Cache was used to provide greater I/O for database hotspots Itron / Microsoft / EMC customers can be confident deploying the Itron MDM on SQL Server at enterprise scale In May, 2011, Itron and Microsoft published the attached Benchmark Testing Results: Unparalleled Scalability of Itron Enterprise Edition on SQL Server. Together, the two companies demonstrated the scalability of Itron Enterprise Edition Meter Data Management (Itron MDM) running on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise by demonstrating the results of 5 million and 10 million meter benchmarks. Conducted at the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC) lab in Redmond, Washington, the benchmark successfully supported the day-in-the-life scenario for both a 5 million and a 10 million meter utility within the target time windows for each of the functions. Day-inthe-life includes all critical automated processes that are performed for key business functions, such as billing and time-of-use pricing, by Itron MDM on a daily basis in an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) system. A more detailed discussion of the day-inthe-life scenarios can be found in the original Itron-Microsoft benchmark at: key/communityserver-blogs-components- weblogfiles/ files/3225.itron-and-sql-server-benchmark_5f00_final pdf For both test scenarios, the four critical processes include: AMI Reading Import (ARI) - Replicate 15-minute and hourly readings across meter population - Import, validate, and load 24 hours of data from a full population of AMI meters into the database - Estimate and load data for meters, with 1% of population missing AMI Billing Export (ABE) Daily Reading Summary (DRS) Like Day Algorithm (LDA) - Calculate and export time-of-use (TOU) billing determinants for one full bill cycle for 6% of meter population (slightly more than the 5% that is typically used by utilities to rotate through the entire population in 20 working days) - Calculate daily totals, peaks, and reference-period usage for all channels (interval and register), and store the data in warehouse tables for analytic and web use - Pre-calculate like days for demand-response events, estimations, and analytic uses s o l u t i o n O V E R V I E W

2 Results for both tests are detailed in the benchmark study. The highlights include: Process Total elapsed time (5 million) Meter Throughput rate Total elapsed time (10 million) Meter Throughput rate ARI 1 hour, 58 min. 35,490 reads/sec. 3 hours, 43 min. 37,500 reads/sec. ABE 1 hour, 36 min. 52 bills/sec. 1 hour, 29 min. 70 bills/sec. The day-in-the-life tests were performed on an EMC information infrastructure. The rest of this addendum to the benchmark will focus on the details of the backend architecture, highlighting how EMC provided a foundation to enable the great results that Itron and Microsoft successfully demonstrated. A diagram of the environment is below: Itron Application Servers (Itron MDM v7.0 SP3) Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with SP1 Running on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Datacenter 4Gb Fibre Channel Storage Area Network Database Server Hardware: HP ProLiant BL680c G5 Intel Xeon E GHz (24 cores) 128 GB RAM EMC CX4-960 As the graphic shows, the Itron application servers are connected to the Microsoft database over a gigabit Ethernet (GbE) local area network (LAN). The database, in turn, is connected to the EMC CLARiiON CX4-960 storage system via a 4 Gb Fibre Channel (FC) storage area network (SAN). The SAN is a dedicated block storage network optimized for large database applications with high speed requirements such as SQL Server. For the past 30 years, EMC has pioneered innovation in SAN environments. EMC s latest technological advancements are designed to maximize performance and efficiency of the investments IT organizations make in their infrastructure. EMC s 1 st strategy is the idea of leveraging Flash drives to maximize the storage system s performance and efficiency while minimizing cost. When even a few Flash drives are combined with the EMC FAST Suite, customers receive the optimal benefits of a 1 st strategy. The EMC FAST Suite is an unrivaled set of software that tiers data across

3 heterogeneous drives and boosts the most active data to Flash drives. 1 st, available only through EMC, ensures customers do not have to make concessions for cost or performance. Within the EMC FAST Suite are two underlying technologies called FAST VP, or fully automated storage tiering for virtual pools, and FAST Cache. The FAST Suite Highest performance and capacity efficiency automatically Flash SSD Realtime caching with FAST Cache Highperformance Scheduled optimization with FAST VP Highcapacity FAST Cache continuously ensures that the hottest data is served from high-performance Flash SSDs FAST VP optimizes storage pools automatically, ensuring only active data is being served from SSDs, while cold data is moved to lower - cost disk tiers Together they deliver a fully automated 1 st storage strategy for optimal performance at the lowest cost attainable FAST automates the identification of data for the purposes of relocating application data across different performance or capacity tiers within an array. The primary benefit is the optimization of the price/performance ratio by leveraging a combination of EMC Flash drives, Fibre Channel, and SATA drives based on the criticality of the data itself. All data is constantly tracked. High activity data or hot data is automatically moved to Flash, whereas low activity data or cold data is moved out of Flash to lower cost hard disk. Data is classified as either hot or cold. Moreover, FAST VP operates at the Sub-LUN level at a granularity of 1 GB chunks, regardless of disk capacity used. The monitoring and movement happens automatically based on customer-defined policies. Solution: Automatic Data Optimization The benefit of all without the cost Active Data SSD 5% Self-Optimizing Storage Pools 95% Disk Inactive Data All data activity is constantly tracked High activity data is automatically moved to Low activity data is automatically moved out of to low cost disk Applications now enjoy lowest response time possible for data that matter 90% utilization $5 per GB effective cost In the Microsoft EEC lab, all database LUNs were enabled with FAST Cache. According to the original benchmark, The EMC FAST Cache was used to provide greater input/output (I/O) for hotspots. In other words, no specific tables were assigned to SSDs. Instead, control of the data cached on the SSDs was left entirely to the EMC FAST Cache software, which allocated space according to most frequently used sectors.

4 FAST Cache as part of EMC s 1 st strategy is often used in conjunction with FAST VP. It uses a tier of flash drives to provide up to 2 TB of read and write caching within the storage system. This caching tier is a large-capacity secondary cache using Flash drives positioned between the storage processor s DRAM-based primary cache and s. FAST Cache extends the storage system s existing caching capacity for better system-wide performance (improved I/Os per second). It does so by extending the functionality of DRAM cache by mapping frequently accessed data to Flash drives, which are an order of magnitude faster than s. At a system level, FAST Cache helps make the most efficient use of Flash drive capacity by using it for the most frequently accessed data, instead of dedicating Flash drives to particular applications. FAST Cache moves data based on 64 Kilobyte (KB) sub-slice chunks, ideal for bursty data. FAST Suite FAST VP + FAST Cache FAST Cache copies hottest data to Flash Optimizes Flash utilization Dynamic movement in near realtime 64 KB sub-slices ideal for bursty data FAST VP tiers across drives in pool Optimizes drive utilization Relative ranking over time 1 GB slices ideal for deterministic data DRAM Cache FAST Cache FAST Virtual Pool SAS S SAS S SAS SAS Itron and Microsoft have leveraged these advanced features in their testing. Within the testing environment, the EMC CLARiiON CX4-960 system was configured as follows: (10) 200 GB EMC Flash Drives 1 TB total of usable capacity RAID 1+0 Configured as FAST Cache (155) 15K RPM, 450 GB Fibre Channel Disks Configured in two FAST VP pools - RAID 1+0 pool of 9.6 TB - RAID 5 pool of 32.2 TB Data on the system was segmented into three different categories, including: Data Multiple 2-3 TB LUNs (logical units) tempdb one 300 GB LUN Logs one 500 GB LUN

5 Itron and Microsoft achieved fantastic results, including greater than 35,000 meter reads per second in the five million meter configuration; and greater than 37,000 meter reads per second for 10 million. Itron and Microsoft were able to achieve these results by leveraging the advanced storage technology that EMC provided. Itron, Microsoft, and EMC will continue to test new scenarios demonstrating performance, functionality, and scalability to provide their customers with the peace of mind of an integrated solution to support their most critical business processes. ABOUT EMC With 21 Partner of the Year awards and 16+ Microsoft Gold and Silver competencies, EMC Corporation helps customers transform IT and confidently leverage their Microsoft SQL Server investments. EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT-as-a-service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments store, manage, protect, and analyze their most valuable asset information in a more agile, trusted, and costefficient way. ABOUT ITRON Itron Inc. is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a leading technology provider to the global energy and water industries. It is the leading provider of energy and water resource management solutions for nearly 8,000 utilities around the world. With 21 Partner of the Year awards and 16+ Microsoft Gold and Silver competencies, EMC Corporation helps customers transform IT and confidently leverage their Microsoft SQL Server investments. It offers end-to-end solutions that include electricity, gas, water and heat measurement and control technology; communications systems; software; and professional services. With nearly 10,000 employees doing business in more than 130 countries, Itron empowers utilities to responsibly and efficiently manage energy and water resources. ABOUT MICROSOFT WORLDWIDE UTILITIES GROUP The Microsoft Worldwide Utilities Group offers platform and partner solutions that empower utilities to thrive in today s market-driven environment through optimized business operations in customer care, generation, trading and risk management, transmission and distribution, regulatory compliance, and enterprise services. Contact Us To learn more about how EMC products, services, and solutions can help solve your business and IT challenges, contact your local representative or authorized reseller or visit us at Additional information about EMC can be found at Additional information about Itron Inc. can be found at For more information about Microsoft, contact your local Microsoft sales representative, or visit EMC 2, EMC, CLARiiON,CX, and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 1/12 Solution Overview H9577 EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. EMC Corporation Hopkinton, Massachusetts In North America