GBASE Financial Application Guide 4 | System Resource Evaluation Methods and Tools

To help financial institutions select a distributed analytical database and promote successful deployment of such databases in the financial industry, GBASE compiled the GBase 8a Financial Application Guide under the guidance of the Beijing FinTech Industry Alliance. The Guide provides an in-depth look at the entire deployment process of a distributed analytical database—from planning and design specifications to data security and high availability, through to operations and optimization—and showcases representative deployment cases of GBase 8a MPP Cluster at China’s policy banks and large state-owned commercial banks.

GBASE will release a series of articles to share and interpret the Guide’s content, hoping to serve as a reference for financial users’ database selection and to support the efficient implementation and high-quality development of technology finance.

This is the fourth article in the series, introducing methods and tools for evaluating system resources.

1. Resource Evaluation Methods

After finalizing the system’s logical and deployment architecture, you need to determine the required number of servers and their configurations through resource evaluation before actual deployment. Resource evaluation begins with a survey to understand current hardware resource requirements, and then uses a resource evaluation tool to estimate the cluster resources needed based on the survey data.

The resource evaluation survey should gather information on:
1) Storage capacity: the total data capacity required;
2) Memory and disk I/O: assessment of business performance standards;
3) The number and configuration of currently available servers;
4) Budget.

2. Resource Evaluation Tool

The survey provides data such as total disk capacity required, disk I/O performance targets, memory capacity, the relative ratio of CPU cores to data managed per node, and other information. Based on this, together with budget and existing server inventory, the number and configuration of new servers to be purchased can be finalized.

GBase 8a provides a resource evaluation tool for calculating resource configurations. Here are the tool’s features and principles:

1) Storage capacity estimation formula used by the GBase 8a resource evaluation tool:

Required cluster storage space = Total data volume × Database workspace factor × Replica factor × RAID factor × File system factor × Database compression factor

2) The GBase 8a resource evaluation tool classifies single-server hardware configurations based on the impact of memory and disk I/O ratios on performance. Below are the workload types and corresponding server hardware configuration categories for GBase 8a:

3) The formula for calculating the number of servers used by the GBase 8a resource evaluation tool is as follows:

Number of cluster nodes = Required cluster storage space / Disk space of a single node’s data storage partition (raw disk space)