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SCALABLE 64-BIT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE FOR THE ENTERPRISE HP MicroStrategy White Paper ® ®

Delivering scalable and high performance BI with least IT effort

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Page 1: Delivering scalable and high performance BI with least IT effort

SCALABLE 64-BIT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE FOR THE ENTERPRISE

HP MicroStrategy White Paper

® ®

Page 2: Delivering scalable and high performance BI with least IT effort

SCALABLE 64-BIT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE FOR THE ENTERPRISE

HP MicroStrategy White Paper

® ®

Executive Summary .....................................................................................................................................................3

2

Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................................4Delivering Enterprise Business Intelligence Efficiently.......................................................................................4Test Environment..........................................................................................................................................................6

Overall Architecture ...............................................................................................................................................6Hardware and Software Configuration...............................................................................................................7Testing Tools ............................................................................................................................................................8Reports Used for the Tests ...................................................................................................................................8Test Configurations ................................................................................................................................................8

Results Analysis and Discussion ...............................................................................................................................9Scale-in......................................................................................................................................................................9Scale-out...................................................................................................................................................................11Multi-level Shared Cache .....................................................................................................................................12

Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................................15

Page 3: Delivering scalable and high performance BI with least IT effort

SCALABLE 64-BIT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE FOR THE ENTERPRISE

HP MicroStrategy White Paper

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This document presents an overview of the technical results of a joint-MicroStrategy and HPperformance benchmark. The tests show how MicroStrategy Business Intelligence (BI) Platform andHP Integrity Servers provide a scalable and cost-effective solution for organizations looking to deploymission critical Enterprise BI applications.

The testing configuration included the MicroStrategy BI Platform installed on HP Integrity Serverswith 64-bit Intel® Itanium® 2 processors and the HP-UX 11i operating system. One HP Integrity rx8620server was used for MicroStrategy Intelligence Server Universal (64-bit) Edition; and two HP Integrityrx4640 servers were used for MicroStrategy Web. Three different tests were run: A scale-in test, ascale-out test, and a multi-level shared cache test.

THE RESULTS SHOW:The 64-bit MicroStrategy Intelligence ServerUniversal Edition can support 10,000 activeusers within a single HP Integrity server,achieving an average response time of 4.45seconds.MicroStrategy Intelligence Server allowsorganizations to double the number ofsupported users simply by doubling thenumber of Intelligence Server CPUs (scale-in) on the HP Integrity rx8620 server, whilemaintaining performance at an outstandingsub-5 second average response time.MicroStrategy clustering capabilities providelinear scalability by adding servers (scale-out), when adding CPUs to a single server isnot possible or not desired.MicroStrategy’s multi-level, shared cachingsignificantly improves performance by a factorgreater than 10x, even at 10,000 active users.The choice of adding CPUs (scale-in) oradding clustered servers (scale-out) is astrategic IT decision based on theorganization’s needs. The decision is primarilyfocused on a trade-off of reduced server

maintenance (scale-in) versus failoverprotection (scale-out). Either way, thecombination of MicroStrategy BI software onHP Integrity server provides outstanding userscalability and performance, while enablingIT with the flexibility to choose theconfiguration best-suited for their enterpriseBI applications.Scalability of the MicroStrategy BI platformextends beyond static online reporting to thefull range of interactive OLAP functionality.Thus, users can exercise functionality suchas “pivot,” “sort,” “page-by,” “drill-anywhere,”and prompts, and still benefit from the highperformance and scalability of theMicroStrategy BI platform.HP Integrity servers with Intel® Itanium® 2processors provide full 64-bit support, layingout a strong, yet flexible foundation formission-critical enterprise applications suchas MicroStrategy BI platform.

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INTRODUCTIONOrganizations are increasingly considering theirBusiness Intelligence systems to be mission-critical Enterprise applications. Thus, anorganization’s success depends on business usersbeing able to efficiently and effectively useBusiness Intelligence applications.

More and more, IT executives who areimplementing Enterprise BI face two majorconcerns. The first one is scalability of the BIapplication.

The second factor, generally overlooked by mostBI vendors, relates to efficiency. Can the BIapplications scale in a cost-effective way?Unfortunately, many relatively small ordepartmental BI applications scattered acrossthe organization become exponentially moreexpensive as they try to scale to Enterprise BIapplications. The hardware resource expense andIT administrative effort grows much faster, themore number of users the application supports.

This paper will show how MicroStrategy 8, dueto its unique Relational OnLine AnalyticalProcessing, or ROLAP, capabilities and its unifiedarchitecture, can help organizations deployscalable, Enterprise-wide Business Intelligencewith the least amount of IT resources.

DELIVERING ENTERPRISE BUSINESSINTELLIGENCE EFFICIENTLYSuccessful BI applications create an acceleratingneed for even more reports, scorecards, andanalyses. Every newly-deployed report sparksthe desire for more reports. Moreover, companiestypically deploy dozens of variations of eachmajor report to satisfy specific interests ofdifferent user groups, each with varying datasecurity and requirements. Most departmental

BI technologies focus on building single reportsrelatively quickly with a minimum of infrastructuralrigor, creating a maintainability nightmare as thenumber of reports grows. A true industrial-strength BI architecture must allow each newreport to be developed more quickly than thelast one and should minimize the number ofreports that need to be explicitly designed in thefirst place.

An efficient Business Intelligence deployment isone that delivers Enterprise BI with the leastamount of IT effort. This means efficient BIapplications can deliver millions of reports neededby the diverse business user population, yetreduce the number of reports that IT mustexplicitly develop, the amount of effort requiredto maintain BI applications, and the amount ofhardware necessary to support the increasinguser population.

MicroStrategy 8 supports highly-efficient,Enterprise-wide Business Intelligence attributableto five critical technological capabilities:

DYNAMIC PROMPT ENGINE -Prompting allows the user to dynamicallycontrol the complete scope of analysis, notjust the filtering criteria. Prompts expandthe potential analysis of a single reportdefinition by giving users the flexibility todecide what attributes and metrics to includewhen the report is run. Prompts also focusthe analytical process by enabling users toprovide filtering criteria that limit the cross-section of the Enterprise data warehouse toinclude in the analysis. Most importantly,users have the flexibility to expand the scopeof their analysis to any part of the enterprisedata warehouse dynamically, without theneed for new reports to be created by IT.

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OLAP ANALYSIS WITH UNIQUE “DRILLANYWHERE” CAPABILITY – ’s unique “drill anywhere” capability allowsusers to surf the entire data warehousewithout requiring IT to hardcode drill pathsand maintain them. “Drill anywhere” is onlyavailable with MicroStrategy’s RelationalOLAP technology or ROLAP. With “drillanywhere,” a user can start with almost anyreport, and drill to any other set of data inthe data warehouse without ever requiringIT to design new reports or anticipate theirneeds.

AUTOMATIC PERSONALIZATIONTHROUGH CELL-LEVEL DATA SECURITY Administrators can protect data by restrictinguser access to an exact range of informationusing Security Filters. As every report is run,it is personalized for each user based on thatuser’s security profile. This security featureensures that every user sees only the datathat they are allowed to see and only thedata relevant to their work. Whereas otherBI technologies require many variations ofthe same report to be designed for differentuser populations, the MicroStrategyarchitecture requires only one report to bedesigned, irrespective of who might run it,and then automatically tailors the contentsof the report for each user.

MULTI-LEVEL SHARED CACHING –MicroStrategy provides four levels ofintelligent caching, in order to ensure usersalways have instant access to reports andanalysis. The levels of cache offered byMicroStrategy platform are “report XMLcache,” “attribute elements cache,”“metadata object cache,” and “databaseconnection cache.” These multiple layers ofcaching are aware of security profiles andpresent only authorized information to theuser.

FULL 64-BIT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE –A major requirement in large-scale userdeployments is to provide high capacitywithin a single server. MicroStrategy is oneof the very few BI technologies that arecompiled to the full breadth of modern 64-bit operating systems. While most othervendors can technically run on 64-bitmachines, they are not compiled to 64-bit,and thus are still constrained to the 2-4 GBmemory limits of 32-bit systems. Thisdifference means that only MicroStrategycan take advantage of the virtually unlimitedaddressable memory space1 available on 64-bit machines, affording MicroStrategyapplications sufficient memory for the richestBI functionality, high-performance sharedcaches, and working space for tens ofthousands of users – all within a single server.

1 Thirty-two-bit compiled software applications can practically only access 2-4 Gigabytes of RAM. In contrast, 64-bit compiledsoftware applications can theoretically access 2^64 RAM or approximately 18 Exabytes of RAM. Practically, 64-bit applicationstypically use 8-64 Gigabytes of RAM.

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OVERALL ARCHITECTUREThe MicroStrategy Business Intelligencearchitecture allows companies to start with small,departmental BI applications and then grow thoseapplications for the whole Enterprise.

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server is a highlyscalable Business Intelligence server; it is thearchitectural foundation of the MicroStrategyplatform. It manages high performance interactions

TEST ENVIRONMENT

accessing terabytes of data by tens of thousandsof users using caching, load balancing, resourceprioritization, and connection pooling. It accessesand joins data from multiple data sources, such asdata warehouses, operational databases, multi-dimensional (cube) databases, and even flat files.

As the central point of contact to the database,MicroStrategy Intelligence Server dynamicallyinterprets user queries to generate optimized multi-pass Structured Query Language (SQL) or Multi-Dimensional eXpression (MDX) statements againstalmost any data source. Intelligence Server retrievesthe data, performs any additional analyticalcalculations not available in the databases, formatsthe report, and delivers the reports to business

users via MicroStrategy Web, MicroStrategy Office,MicroStrategy Desktop, or MicroStrategyNarrowcast Server.

MicroStrategy Web is the primary business userinterface for the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence(BI) platform and the one used for testing purposes.With MicroStrategy Web, business users can view,edit and create all types of reports in a single,intuitive interface without assistance from IT.

Additionally, business users can personalize reportresults by answering a series of intuitive questions(prompts) to meet their specific analysis needs.This business user self-service frees IT departmentsto devote more time to work on BI applicationactivities that fully leverage their technical expertise.

HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE CONFIGURATIONAll of the MicroStrategy BI software was installedon HP Integrity Servers, which use Intel® Itanium®

2 processors and the HP-UX 11iv2 operating system(see figure 3-1). In order to conduct all of thescalability tests (see Test Configurations), theMicroStrategy Intelligence Server varied thenumber of CPUs and the number of servers used.

MicroStrategy Web

MicroStrategyIntelligence Server

2 - HP Integrity rx4640 Servers• 4-way 1.5 GHz Intel

®

Itanium® 2 processors

• 8 GB RAM

1- HP Integrity rx8620 Server• 16-way 1.5 GHz Intel

®

Itanium® 2 processors

• 32 GB RAM total• Configured into 2-nPars- Up to 8 CPUs per nPar- 16 GB RAM per nPar

MicroStrategy WebUniversal 8.0.2

MicroStrategyIntelligence ServerUniversal (64-bit)8.0.2

HP-UX 11iv2

HP-UX 11iv2

Architectural Component Hardware Software Operating System

Figure 3-1: MicroStrategy BI Software Installation on HP Integrity Servers

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1. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server Universal(64-bit) EditionOne 16-way HP Integrity rx8620 server wasdivided into two physical partitions, or nPars2,each of them containing 8 CPUs.MicroStrategy Intelligence Server Universalwas installed on each physical partition.The number of CPUs utilized by MicroStrategyIntelligence Server on each physical partitionof the HP Integrity servers varied from oneto eight in order to test different hardwarescenarios.

SOFTWARE INSTALLATION

2. MicroStrategy Web UniversalInstalled on two HP Integrity rx4640 servers.For the scale-in and scale-out tests (see TestConfigurations), both HP Integrity servers andall the CPUs on each server were used.For the caching test (see Test Configurations),only one HP server was used.

2 Hewlett-Packard's nPartition system capabilities enable you to configure a single server complex as one large system oras multiple smaller systems. These hard partitions are designed to provide for complete electrical and software isolation. Fororganizations where high availability is critical, this feature ensures that any fault within one partition cannot impact anyother partition. Applications running within hard partitions are not subject to hardware or software events in other partitions.

Figure 3-2 shows the overall performance testing environment. The configuration above remained constantexcept for the “BI Application Server” tier or the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server tier, which varied dependingupon the tests conducted.

Web Server

MicroStrategy WebUniversal 8.0.2

Apache Tomcat ApplicationServer

2 - HP Integrity rx4640Servers

• 4-Intel® Itanium® 2 CPUs• 8 GB RAM• HP-UX 11iv2 OS

MicroStrategy IntelligenceServer Universal 8.0.2

2 nPars - HP Integrity rx8620Server

• Up to 8 - Intel® Itanium® 2 CPUs per nPar

• 16 GB RAM per nPar• HP-UX 11iv2 OS

Web Clients BI Application Server Database Server

Oracle 10g

Figure 3-2: MicroStrategy and HP Overall Testing Environment

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TESTING TOOLS

Web user traffic and connections were generatedusing MicroStrategy proprietary testing softwarecalled MFCBlaster, which measures the steadyrate of transaction submission and averageresponse time for all transactions.

REPORTS USED FOR THE TESTSThe data was derived from a TPC-H database andis representative of any business that manages,sells, or distributes products. The following is adescription of representative samples of the 11distinct reports used during the tests.

A cross-tab report shows revenue for partssold and part types. This report displays agrid containing up to 15,232 cells of data,depending on the prompt answers selectedby the user.A cross-tab report shows account balanceand total cost for individual suppliers,supplier’s region and nation. This reportshows up to 1,257 cells of data, dependingon the user’s profile.

TEST CONFIGURATIONSWeb user connections were simulated on theclient machines using MFCBlaster. TheseMFCBlaster users were connected toMicroStrategy Web to execute different actions,including “report execution,” OLAP manipulationsincluding “sort,” “pivot,” and “page-by,” and ad-hoc reporting using prompts and drill functionality.

It is important to highlight that no delays wereincluded in any of the testing scripts, meaningthat all users in the system were truly concurrentusers. Adding delays into the system caneffectively reduce the true level of concurrency,making a system appear more scalable, when inreality, many of the users might be idle.

For the purpose of this analysis, we assume aconcurrent user to active user ratio of 2%. Ingeneral, concurrent user to active user ratiosvary, depending on the specific productionenvironment.

Three benchmarks were performed todemonstrate the scalability of the MicroStrategyBI platform.

1. A scale-in test was performed to demonstratesingle-server scalability of the MicroStrategyplatform at different levels of concurrency.Tests were conducted with 1, 2, 4, and 8 CPUs.

2. A scale-out test was performed to provescalability of MicroStrategy’s proprietaryclustering capabilities. Tests were conductedwith single node and 2-node configurations.For the purpose of this test, 4-CPUs wereactive on each server node.

3. A multi-level, shared cache test wasperformed to show how MicroStrategy’sefficient multi-level caching capabilities canconsiderably enhance performance. For thepurpose of this test, 4-CPUs were active onthe MicroStrategy Intelligence Server machine.

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3 The OLAP Survey 5, published in 2005 and conducted annually by independent analyst Nigel Pendse and Survey.com,(http://www.survey.com/olap), compiled the BI experiences of 2,100 Organizations. The OLAP Survey 5 shows that organizationscan maximize their business benefits by using “Performance” as the number one factor when selecting a BI software tool.

Web Server

MicroStrategy WebUniversal 8.0.2

Apache Tomcat ApplicationServer

2 - HP Integrity rx4640Servers

• 4-Intel® Itanium® 2 CPUs• 8 GB RAM• HP-UX 11iv2 OS

MicroStrategy IntelligenceServer Universal 8.0.2

1 nPar - HP Integrity rx8620Server

• Up to 8 - Intel® Itanium® 2 CPUs

• 16 GB RAM Total• HP-UX 11iv2 OS

Web Clients BI Application Server Database Server

Oracle 10g

Figure 4-1: Scale-In Test Configuration

RESULTS ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

Figure 4-1 shows the Scale-In performance testing environment. The Intelligence Server tier varied the numberof CPUs and the number of active users for each series of tests.

SCALE-INTo Scale-in means to increase the number of processors on a single server in order to increase itscapacity. An organization may choose this configuration because of reduced cost and managementoverhead offered by a single server approach.

THE SCALE-IN TEST CONFIGURATION (FIGURE 4-1):Scale-in tests were performed with 1, 2, 4, and 8 CPUs in order to demonstrate MicroStrategyIntelligence Server scalability on a single server.The performance metric, Average Response Time, was measured 3.The number of active users and CPUs were doubled for each set of tests.

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0

2

4

6

8

10

1 2 4 8

CPUs

0

2000

4000

6000

8000

10000

12000

Supported

Users

Average

Response

Time (s)

Figure 4-2: Constant Average Response Time and User Scalability v. CPUs

THE SCALE-IN TEST RESULTS SHOW (FIGURE 4-2):1. Average response time remains constant, even as the number of users are doubled whencorrespondingly doubling the number of CPUs.2. At the highest load of 10,000 active users, the average response time was 4.45 seconds.

Figure 4-2 shows the average response time stays constant, below 5 seconds, when the number of users andnumber of CPUs double.

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server delivers outstanding user scalability and performance, fully leveragingthe additional processing power of the Intel® Itanium® 2 CPUs in the HP Integrity Server.

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To Scale-out means to increase the number ofservers running an application in order to increasecapacity. Typically, a scale-out system isimplemented using a cluster configuration. Acluster is two or more servers or “nodes”perceived as a single-server resource. Anorganization may choose this configurationbecause it offers fail-over support. If one of theservers in a cluster fails, the others can continueon with the work.

The Scale-out test configuration (Figure 4-3):Scale-out tests were performed comparinga single node configuration with one 4-CPU

Figure 4-3: Scale-Out Test Configuration

Figure 4-3 shows the Scale-Out performance testing environment for the 2-node Intelligence Server cluster.

SCALE OUT

Intelligence Server vs. a 2-node clusterconfiguration with two Intelligence Serverseach running on 4 CPUs.No additional third-party hardware orsoftware was required to clusterMicroStrategy Intelligence Server. Unlikemany other BI software vendors,MicroStrategy provides advanced clusteringcapabilities out-of-the-box.Both configurations were tested to amaximum load of 10,000 active users.Average response time was measured forboth configurations.

Web Server

MicroStrategy WebUniversal 8.0.2

Apache Tomcat ApplicationServer

2 - HP Integrity rx4640Servers

• 4-Intel® Itanium® 2 CPUs• 8 GB RAM• HP-UX 11iv2 OS

MicroStrategy IntelligenceServer Universal 8.0.2Using Clustering

2 nPars - HP Integrity rx8620Server

• 4 - Intel® Itanium® 2 CPUs• 16 GB RAM per nPar• HP-UX 11iv2 OS

Web Clients BI Application Server Database Server

Oracle 10g

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Figure 4-4: Average Response Time v. CPUs

Single

Node

2-Node

Cluster

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000

Active Users

Figure 4-4: A 2-node cluster of MicroStrategy Intelligence Servers delivers performance twice as fast as thatof a single node.

SCALE OUT

THE SCALE-OUT TEST RESULTS SHOW (FIGURE 4-4):1. A 2-node cluster average response time is, on average, twice as fast as that of a single node serverinstance, even at high user loads.2. MicroStrategy clustering capabilities provide linear scalability by adding additional servers (scale-out) when adding CPUs to a single server is not possible or not desired.

MULTI-LEVEL SHARED CACHECaching is a common performance optimizationtechnique used by software applications. For BIsoftware, caching stores frequently-used piecesof information to improve performance 4. However,not all caching available from BI softwarecompanies is created equal. Most applicationswill merely cache the final report results. While

4 From Wikipedia: “In computer science, a cache (pronounced like the English word cash) is a collection of data duplicatingoriginal values stored elsewhere or computed earlier, where the original data is expensive (usually in terms of access time) tofetch or compute relative to reading the cache. Once the data is stored in the cache, future use can be made by accessing thecached copy rather than re-fetching or re-computing the original data, so that the average access time is lower.”

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this limited caching certainly helps performance,it is generally insufficient, especially at high userloads. Performance is further hampered by thefact that the report results must exactly matcha user’s security restrictions in order to reuse thereport results.

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Web ServerMicroStrategy WebUniversal 8.0.2

Apache Tomcat ApplicationServer

1 - HP Integrity rx4640 Server

• 4-Intel® Itanium® 2 CPUs• 8 GB RAM• HP-UX 11iv2 OS

MicroStrategy IntelligenceServer Universal 8.0.2

1 nPar - HP Integrity rx8620Server

• 4 - Intel® Itanium® 2 CPUs• 16 GB RAM Total• HP-UX 11iv2 OS

Web Clients BI Application Server Database ServerOracle 10g

Figure 4-5: Multi-level Caching Test Configuration

Figure 4-5 shows the Multi-level Cache performance testing environment using a single Intelligence Server

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Conversely, MicroStrategy provides four levels ofintelligent caching to ensure that users alwayshave instant access to reports and analysis. Eachdifferent level of caching was designed takinginto consideration various usage scenarios anduser behavior in order to provide the mostimprovement.

To illustrate the importance of caching, considerthe following scenario. A business user may loginto MicroStrategy, search for a report, build anew report, answer a prompt, run the report,conduct further analysis on the result set, andsave the report before logging out. Within thisquery flow, Intelligence Server caches specificdata in these four crucial areas:1. Metadata object cache speeds up metadata

browsing and ad hoc report creation.2. Attribute element cache speeds up prompted

data requests.3. Database connection cache speeds up

database communication and query requests.4. Report results XML cache speeds up

presenting final report results and analysis.

These multiple layers of caching are aware ofsecurity profiles, thereby presenting onlyauthorized information to the user; therefore,caches can be shared among users who don’thave the same security profile.

THE MULTI-LEVEL SHARED CACHE TESTCONFIGURATION (FIGURE 4-5):

Multi-level cache tests compared a single 4-CPU Intelligence Server with caching turnedoff vs. a single 4-CPU Intelligence Server withcaching turned on.The tested reports simulated heavy loadconditions.Average response time was measured forboth configurations.Both configurations were tested to amaximum load of 10,000 active users.

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THE MULTI-LEVEL CACHE TEST RESULTS SHOW (FIGURE 4-6):1. The average response time is nearly 10x faster on average than with caching turned off at thehighest user loads.2. Response time remains nearly constant throughout the tests, even at higher active user loads.3. The average response time performance improvement is most evident at higher active user loads,where one user can benefit from results cached by other users, thereby underscoring the importanceof a sophisticated caching architecture to support user scalability.

Figure 4-6: Average Response Time With Caching vs. Without Caching

Figure 4-6 shows the average response time with multi-level caching turned on is 10x faster than withoutcaching at the highest user loads.

Multi-level

Cache ON

Multi-level

Cache OFF

Multi-level Shared Cache

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000

Active Users

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This level of scalability is achieved due to fourcore capabilities of MicroStrategy platform.1. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server’s full 64-

bit support takes advantage of the expandedaddressable memory space to handle moreusers and larger caches.

2. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server’s scale-incapabilities effectively and efficiently use theincreased computing power of additionalCPUs for maximum performance.

3. MicroStrategy’s clustering capabilitiesautomatically balance the load across allMicroStrategy servers in the cluster formaximum scale-out performance.

4. MicroStrategy’s multi-level, shared cachingarchitecture speeds up response time,maximizing performance as more people usethe system.

SPECIFICALLY THE TEST RESULTS SHOW:The 64-bit MicroStrategy Intelligence ServerUniversal Edition can support 10,000 activeusers within a single HP Integrity server,achieving an average response time of 4.45seconds.MicroStrategy Intelligence Server allowsorganizations to double the number ofsupported users simply by doubling thenumber of Intelligence Server CPUs (scale-in) on the HP Integrity rx8620 server, whilemaintaining performance at an outstandingsub-5 second average response time.MicroStrategy clustering capabilities providelinear scalability by adding servers (scale-out) when adding CPUs to a single server isnot possible or not desired.

CONCLUSION

MicroStrategy’s multi-level shared cachingsignificantly improves performance, by a factorgreater than 10x, even at 10,000 active users.The choice of adding CPUs (scale-in) oradding clustered servers (scale-out) is astrategic IT decision based on theorganization’s needs. The decision is primarilyfocused on a trade-off of reduced servermaintenance (scale-in) versus failoverprotection (scale-out). Either way, thecombination of MicroStrategy BI softwareon HP Integrity server provides outstandinguser scalability and performance, while givingIT the flexibility to choose the configurationbest for their Enterprise BI applications.Scalability of the MicroStrategy BI platformextends beyond static online reporting tothe full range of interactive OLAPfunctionality. Thus, users can exercisefunctionality such as “pivot” “sort,” “page-by,” “drill-anywhere,” and prompts, and stillbenefit from the high performance andscalability of the MicroStrategy BI platform.HP Integrity servers with Intel® Itanium® 2processors provide full 64-bit support layingout a strong, yet flexible, foundation formission-critical Enterprise applications suchas MicroStrategy BI platform.

The test results show that the MicroStrategy BIplatform provides the functionality and scalabilitythat organizations need to implement andmaintain their BI implementations with minimumresources. Furthermore, organizations can beassured that as their BI implementations evolve

THE RESULTS VALIDATE THAT THE MICROSTRATEGY BI PLATFORM RUNNING ON HPINTEGRITY SERVERS DELIVERS A HIGHLY-SCALABLE BI ARCHITECTURE.MicroStrategy can scale equally well by adding CPUs (scale-in) to a single HP server or by addingservers (scale-out) to a cluster. More importantly, due to its unique architecture, MicroStrategy iscapable of delivering more reports to more business users across the Enterprise with the minimumamount of it resources.

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HP Information© 2006 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties forHP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should beconstrued as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Printed in the US

Intel Information©2006 Intel Corporation. all rights reserved. Intel, the Intel logo, and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or itssubsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

MicroStrategy Information©2006 MicroStrategy, Inc.  All rights reserved.  MicroStrategy, the MicroStrategy logo, and MicroStrategy 8 are trademarks or registered trademarksof MicroStrategy, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.  The information contained herein is subject to change withoutnotice.  MicroStrategy shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Other names and brand may be claimed as the property of their respective owners

Published in the US: Intel HP MicroStrategy 1-2LFNA/October 2006/HP

and grow, MicroStrategy will seamlessly scale withthem to support the most demanding user needswhile minimizing the amount of extra IT resources.

However, software scalability is not possiblewithout the proven scalability of the underlyinghardware. HP Integrity servers with Intel® Itanium®

2 processors provide full 64-bit support, providingthe strongest foundation for mission-criticalEnterprise applications such as MicroStrategy BIplatform. Moreover, HP Integrity servers providethe scalability and flexibility to adapt for changingbusiness needs, while minimizing computing costs.

The results validate that MicroStrategy BI Platformrunning on HP Integrity Servers with Intel®

Itanium® 2 processors provide a flexible and cost-effective solution for organizations looking todeploy mission-critical Enterprise BI applications.HP Integrity servers provide an exceptionalhardware solution, which is consistent withMicroStrategy’s vision of scalability and reliabilitywhile minimizing IT overhead.

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