EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 Maintaining High Performance in a Production Environment Abstract

EMC Corporation and Microsoft create solutions that enable organizations to effectively manage critical business data. Microsoft® SQL Server™ database software is the leading database used on the Windows® operating systems, and complements the EMC® Documentum® Enterprise Content Management Platform. To demonstrate the performance benefits that customers can expect to realize by running EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 content management software on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 compared to running on its predecessor, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft and EMC conducted benchmark tests at a Microsoft lab facility in November 2006. The results show that SQL Server 2005 enables the database server to handle five times the number of users as compared with the older version with an identical workload. The tests also demonstrate that average overall response times across a variety of transactions are 53 percent faster with SQL Server 2005 as compared with SQL Server 2000.

Contents

Introduction ...............................................................................................................................................1 

Benchmark Profile ....................................................................................................................................2 

Methodology .............................................................................................................................................3 

Business Processes .................................................................................................................................4 

Webtop Transaction Results ....................................................................................................................5 Server Performance .............................................................................................................................6 

Benchmark Environment ..........................................................................................................................7 Hardware Configuration .......................................................................................................................7 

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................9 

Related Links ..........................................................................................................................................10 

Introduction In October 2006, EMC Corporation and Microsoft announced an alliance to help organizations better manage their compliance, regulatory, and other critical business data. As part of this strategic alliance, EMC is introducing a set of new content and archiving products that enable tighter integration between the industry-leading EMC Documentum enterprise content management platform and Microsoft solutions and platform technologies.

As a global leader in content management applications, EMC is committed to delivering high-performance solutions that deliver rich functionality with robust performance at volumes that are representative of customer environments.

Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. Microsoft® SQL Server™ database software is the leading database used on the Windows® operating systems.

SQL Server complements the EMC Documentum Enterprise Content Management Platform, which are client/server and Web-based software applications that customers can use to capture, manage, and release information to the enterprise.

This benchmark done by Microsoft and EMC demonstrates Documentum Webtop software’s performance characteristics for a range of processing volumes in a specific configuration. Customers and prospects can use this information to determine the software, hardware, and network configurations necessary to support their processing volumes.

The primary objective of this benchmarking effort is to provide as many data points as possible to support this important decision.

EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 Webtop with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 1

Benchmark Profile In November 2006, EMC and Microsoft jointly conducted a Documentum 5.3 SP4 Webtop benchmark to compare the transaction performance using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition.

The goal of this benchmark was to determine and document the performance of the two SQL Server releases with EMC Documentum Webtop 5.3 SP4 for 300 concurrent users. To do this, EMC and Microsoft simulated the daily activities of a typical user going through the Webtop Classic mode interface to carry out a variety of document management activities within the Documentum system.

The software was installed on a four-way Hewlett-Packard HP DL580 server computer and a DL585 database server running the 32-bit version of the Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1 operating system.

Activity processing times and the consumption of server resources were monitored throughout the benchmark. The tests measured activity during a time window of approximately two hours. The benchmark was conducted in a Microsoft facility in Issaquah, Washington, with no other applications running on the server.

Figure 1 illustrates average response times for 300 concurrent users performing various actions in Webtop. Note that the average overall response time for SQL Server 2005 was 53 percent faster than for SQL Server 2000.

Figure 1. Webtop transaction response times comparison at 300-users level

EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 Webtop with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 2

Methodology Mercury Interactive Load Runner was used as the load driver to simulate the presence of 300 concurrent users on the system. The software submitted a business process at an average rate of once every one minute for each concurrent user.

Measurements were recorded on all of the servers when the user load was attained and the environment reached a steady state.

Figure 2 shows the four-tier benchmark configuration implemented for this test.

Figure 2. Four-tier benchmark configuration

Response times were measured from the time the user clicked a hyperlink or pressed a button until the content was retrieved from the database and rendered in a new HTML page.

EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 Webtop with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 3

EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 Webtop with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 4

Business Processes EMC Documentum defines a business process as a series of HTML pages that guide a user through a business transaction.

Ten different types of Documentum Webtop business transactions were exercised in this benchmark:

Log on: The user logged on to the Classic Cabinets view within Webtop.

Advanced Search: The user navigated to the Advanced Search page and searched for all documents that started with a randomly chosen word. After the results were retrieved, the user selected one document at random and exported it to the desktop. The user then returned to the Cabinets view.

Checkout: The user navigated to the MyFiles view, selects a document at random, and checks it out. The user then returned to the Cabinets view.

Checkin: The user navigated to the MyFiles view, selected a checked out document at random, and checked it in. The user then returned to the Cabinets view.

Subscriptions: The user navigated to the Subscriptions view and selected a document at random to export. The user then returned to the Cabinets view.

Import: The user navigated to the Home cabinet and imported a document. The user then returned to the Cabinets view.

Navigation: The user navigated to a random cabinet, navigated to two folders down, and selected a document at random for export. The user then returned to the Cabinets view.

Inbox: The user navigated to the Inbox, selected a task, opened it, and exported the attached file. The user then returned to the Cabinets view.

Sized Search: The user performed a search that was guaranteed to return 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, or 100 matches, depending on the search parameter entered. Then the user exported one document to the file system at random and returned to the Cabinets view.

Log off: The user logged off from the Classic Cabinets view of Webtop.

Webtop Transaction Results

Chart 1a. Illustrates the average response times for Advanced Search, Check In, Check Out and Inbox transactions

Chart 1b. Illustrates the average response times for Navigation, Sized Search, Subscription and Login/Logout transactions

Performance may vary on other hardware and software platforms and with other data composition models.

EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 Webtop with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 5

Server Performance

Figure 3 summarizes the CPU utilization for each of the server instances.

Figure 3. Average CPU utilization across all servers

Figure 4 summarizes the CPU utilization for the two different SQL Server databases. Note that SQL Server 2005 consumes only 12.05 percent of available CPU resources compared with 62.50 percent for SQL Server 2000—a five-fold improvement for SQL Server 2005.

Figure 4. CPU utilization comparison between SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000

EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 Webtop with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 6

EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 Webtop with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 7

Benchmark Environment

Hardware Configuration

Database server (32-bit)

One Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL580 was used as the database server computer. The server was equipped with the following:

• 4 × 3 gigahertz Intel Xeon MP processors, each with 8 kilobytes of Level-1 cache, 512 KB of Level-2 cache, 4 megabytes of Level-3 cache

• 8 gigabytes of memory

• ~108 GB of internal SCSI disk space (2 × 36 GB RAID 1 and 2 × 72 GB RAID 1)

• 1 SAN-connected HP MSA 1000 disk array with four available Fibre Channel connections connected using one Emulex 2 GB host bus adapter (HBA)

o 2 × 72 GB RAID 1 - Logs

o 2 × 72 GB RAID 1 – TempDB

o 10 × 72 GB RAID 10 - DATA

Content server

One Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL580 was used as the content server. The server was equipped with the following:

• 4 × 3 GHz Intel Xeon MP processors, each with 8 KB of Level-1 cache, 512 KB of Level-2 cache, 4 MB of Level-3 cache

• 8 GB of memory

• ~108 GB of internal system-addressable storage (SAS) disk space (2 × 36 GB + 2 × 72 GB)

• 1 SAN-connected HP MSA 1000 disk array with four available Fibre Channel connections connected via one Emulex 2 GB HBA

o 14 × 36GB RAID 5 - DATA

Web servers

Three Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL580s were used as Web servers. They were equipped with the following:

• 4 × 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon processors, each with 512 KB of Level-2 cache and 1 MB of Level-3 cache

• 4 GB of memory

• ~36 GB of internal SCSI disk space (2 × 36 GB RAID 1)

EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 Webtop with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 8

Load simulation drivers

Three Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL380s were used as the driver. They were equipped with the following:

• 2 × 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon processors, each with 512 KB of Level-2 cache and 1 MB of Level-3 cache

• 2 GB of memory

• ~36 GB of internal SCSI disk space (2 × 36 GB RAID 1)

Controller

One Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL580 was used as the controller. It was equipped with the following:

• 4 × 3 GHz Intel Xeon MP processors, each with 8 KB of Level-1 cache, 512 KB of Level-2 cache, 4 MB of Level-3 cache

• 8 GB of memory

• ~108 GB of internal SAS disk space (2 × 36 GB + 2 × 72 GB)

Software versions

The following software versions were used for the benchmark tests:

• EMC Documentum Webtop 5.3 SP4 build 406

• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (32-bit)

• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (32-bit)

• Microsoft Windows 2003 SP1 Enterprise Edition (32-bit)

• Mercury Interactive Load Runner 8.1 fp2

• Apache Tomcat 5.0.28

• Java 1.4.2_12

EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 Webtop with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 9

Conclusion This benchmark test illustrates the performance benefits that customers can expect to realize by running EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 content management software on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 compared to running it on the previous version, SQL Server 2000. Lab test results showed that by using the newer version as the database backend, the database server should be able to handle approximately five times the number of users as compared with the older version with an identical workload. The tests also demonstrated that average overall response times across a variety of transactions were 53 percent faster for SQL Server 2005.

EMC Documentum 5.3 SP4 Webtop with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 10

Related Links See the following resources for further information:

EMC Corporation at http://www.emc.com

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 at http://www.microsoft.com/sql

For the latest information about the EMC product integration with Microsoft technology, see the Integration with Microsoft site at http://software.emc.com/msintegration.

For the latest information about the Microsoft Server Product Portfolio, see the Microsoft Servers Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/servers.

The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.

This white paper is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT AND EMC MAKE NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT.

Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering this document or the subject matter included in this document. The furnishing of this document does not give the reader any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property.

© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

EMC2, EMC, Documentum and where information lives are trademarks of EMC Corporation.

Published March 2007