--- title: "The Genie in the LAMP" publish_date: 2014-10-07 author: "MariaDB" --- # The Genie in the LAMP ![](/sites/default/files/pictures/Images/Screen%20Shot%202014-10-07%20at%2013.08.14.png)Remember when the LAMP stack was young? Open source Linux, Apache HTTPd, MySQL, and PHP were the insurgent technologies delivering world-beating performance and scale at unheard-of prices, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Now, the LAMP stack has evolved and matured. It remains the core of high-performance, scale-out application architectures, and has been for well over a decade now. As a consequence, enterprise software has never been more easily developed, deployed, and scaled than with today’s mature application architectures. Now, web-scale applications handle multiple terabytes of data and millions of users, all with continuous availability, transactional consistency, and easy scaling. So, how to assemble the most highly-evolved implementation of this industry-standard platform? Who can help you deploy your application with superior performance and scalability, ironclad availability, and low cost-of-ownership? Turn to the experts: [IBM](http://www.ibm.com) and [MariaDB](http://www.mariadb.com). ## MariaDB: The Database Heart MariaDB is an open source, community-built descendant of MySQL, and the rightful heir to the rich legacy of the LAMP stack’s favorite database technology. MariaDB is application-compatible, so your existing applications just work. With a vendor-independent community at the heart of its development and many of the original inventors of MySQL steering its course, MariaDB is a more advanced implementation of the world’s most widely adopted RDBMS technology. MariaDB uses a modern, sophisticated extension of MySQL’s replication technology to let you “scale-out” to handle very large production deployments. It is an ACID-compliant, transactional database that implements the proven relational data model embodied by the standard SQL query language. ## IBM Power 8: A Complementary Architecture What makes MariaDB really sing? An underlying computing platform that runs optimized industry-standard Linux distributions, but that has the cores, thread management, and I/O and memory bandwidth to blast through the transactional demands of thousands of concurrent users, complex application architectures, and massive data volumes. Compare the performance of MariaDB on IBM’s 10-core Power 8 S822L with 256GB of DRAM, vs. their Intel IvyBridge 12-core x3650 server with 384GB of DRAM, running the same Ubuntu Linux kernel under KVM, and using the same storage system for the database. ![Sysbench Performance](/sites/default/files/pictures/Images/Screen%20Shot%202014-10-07%20at%2013.08.26.png) The [Power 8 system](http://www.ibm.com/systems/power/) delivers 2.24 times the transactions per second per core on the standard Sysbench OLTP benchmark. Sure, you can use MariaDB’s industry-leading replication technology to scale out either of these systems to handle massive deployments. But lets look at why combining higher-performance Power 8 servers with MariaDB’s proven replication capabilities might deliver more cost-effective scaling. ## Scale Up + Scale Out: Not Just Blowing Smoke Porting and optimizing MariaDB 10 to the Power 8 architecture has been a collaborative effort between the database experts at MariaDB, and IBM’s system architects. The engineering teams have worked together to leverage unique capabilities of MariaDB, including: - An improved version of the standard InnoDB storage engine familiar to MySQL DBAs. - Tuned multi-threading including an improved thread pool management system exclusive to MariaDB 10. - Advanced memory management, including efficient buffer pool and cache implementations. - Exclusive parallel slave architecture which delivers nearly 10x better cluster replication performance than MySQL. Combining Power 8 and MariaDB delivers both cost savings and the potential for even more massive scale, because with more then 2.2 times the performance per core: - Many applications can do without slave replication entirely, greatly simplifying deployment and reducing the burden on your DBAs. - Fewer servers means less power, rack units and floor space, and lower data center costs. - With less need for massive replication hierarchies, your database infrastructure can run with a smaller staff. - You retain the flexibility and headroom to deploy replicated database infrastructure for higher availability, massive scalability, and disaster resilience, all with less staff, servers, and complexity. ## IBM and MariaDB Grant Your Three Wishes The combination of Power 8 and MariaDB is not magic. But it is the culmination of many years of system and database optimizations designed to deliver magical performance and scale. Oh Power 8 and MariaDB Genie, here are three wishes: Customer – your wish is granted! - Reduce my staffing, data center, and licensing costs, - Give me flexibility to handle even the most demanding scale, and - Support me in deploying the most advanced infrastructure technologies in the world! Want to know more about running MariaDB optimized for POWER8? [Reach out to us](/about/contact "Reach out to us") and member of our team will call back.