Ocient System Requirements
In order to run the , you must meet several requirements for your system hardware, OS, and software. The requirements ensure that your system can run an optimized and fully functional installation.
These requirements apply to the Foundation, Loader, and SQL Nodes.
Consult with Ocient or the System Administrator installing Ocient to determine the optimal configuration for your Ocient deployment.
These are the hardware requirements for the Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse node servers. These requirements include the Foundation (LTS), Loader, SQL, and Metadata Node types. Data (i.e. non-OS) drive requirements are listed separately.
Component | Requirements | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Chassis/System | 8+ NVMe hotswap bays Dual CPUs M.2 slots for OS drives Redundant power supplies | |
CPU | 26+ cores per CPU recommended. Must support AVX2 instruction set. | |
Memory | 1TB+ recommended All CPU memory channels must be populated to achieve maximum memory bandwidth. | Balanced memory configuration with all memory channels populated required to achieve maximum bandwidth. |
High Speed Network | 100Gbit dual port ethernet NIC | Mellanox ConnectX-5 MCX516A-CCAT recommended. Dual ports required for redundancy. |
OS Drives | 1TB+ Enterprise NVMe drives (M.2) | RAID-1 mirroring recommended. M.2 format recommended to keep all U.2 bays available for data drives. |
Data Drives | See Data Drive Requirements. | NVMe drives for short-term and long-term data storage. |
The optional metadata nodes have fewer requirements than the other nodes.
Component | Requirements | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Chassis/System | Virtual Machine or Physical Machine | No specific chassis requirements. Can be a virtual machine. |
CPU | 2+ cores Xeon-D or similar x86-64 CPU | Must support AVX2 instruction set. You might need to change the virtual machine CPU type to support AVX2 instructions. |
Memory | 16GB | |
Network | 10 Gbps NIC or virtual NIC | Metadata Nodes do not require high speed networking. Dual ports are required for redundancy. |
OS Drive | 512GB Enterprise SSD or SSD backed storage pool | NVMe is recommended. |
Ocient strictly requires high performance enterprise or datacenter NVMe SSD drives for long term and short term data storage. The drives listed here have been validated for functionality and performance. They also support drive self-encryption using the OPAL standard. All data stored is encrypted at rest. Power loss protection (PLP), standard on enterprise and datacenter drives, is also required. Endurance of 0.5 drive writes per day (DWPD) or higher is recommended for Foundation and SQL Nodes, endurance of 1.0 DWPD is recommended for Loader Nodes.
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Solidigm P5510 firmware versions VDV10151 and VDV10152 are known to not work properly with OPAL enabled. Upgrade the firmware to a known working version.
Enterprise NVMe drives with similar or better performance characteristics and OPAL (or better) support can be considered for validation.
If the Ocient system detects hardware support for the OPAL standard, then nodes enable full disk encryption on data drives by default. Ocient stores the encryption keys on the operating system drive. For the complete list of directories to back up, see Backup and Restore.
These operation systems and versions are fully supported by Ocient:
RHEL versions 8.3 and prior require a kernel upgrade for compatibility. There is a bug in the uio_pci_generic driver in the kernel provided with those versions that prevents Ocient from communicating with the NVMe drives.
Ocient requires high bandwidth connections between its database nodes to achieve high performance. It is critical for performance that the Foundation and SQL Nodes can simultaneously utilize high bandwidth links without bottlenecks. Generally this means that those nodes share the same switch backplane for best performance.
The minimum recommended link speed is 100Gbps.
Redundant networking is recommended for production use cases. On the server side, dual port NICs are required to support redundancy. Multi-chassis link aggregation (MLAG/CLAG/MCLAG) using redundant switches is the recommended form of redundancy.
These are the requirements for the network switches to support Ocient. No other advanced L2 or L3 features are required.
- Enough 100G ports for all Foundation Nodes on the same backplane for best performance.
- Multi-chassis link aggregation for redundancy (MLAG/CLAG/MCLAG depending on vendor terminology).
To secure data stored on disk, Ocient supports and recommends SEDs (Self-Encrypting Drives) that meet the OPAL (or better) standard. Using drives that support this standard, Ocient software enables encryption of data at rest on the drives. This encryption prevents unwanted data leaks, as any time a disk is removed from the system it becomes locked and the data can only be recovered with a key-encrypting-key that is stored off-drive.
To secure network communications, Ocient recommends using a firewall to restrict network access to only the required ports and protocols on the Loader and SQL Nodes. These are the endpoints that are needed for external users to interact with an Ocient system.
These ports are the default ports by node type.
Node Type | Description | Default Port |
|---|---|---|
SQL Node | JDBC endpoint | 4050 |
Loader Node | LAT management endpoint | 8443 |
Ocient depends on these software packages:
- python3
- sudo
- lz4
- cronie
- logrotate
- gzip
- pciutils
- ca-certificates
- libquadmath (RHEL), libquadmath0 (Ubuntu)
For database nodes, these packages are installed automatically as part of the package dependencies.
Ocient also depends on a separate installation of openjdk-17 (Loader Nodes only) outside of the standard package manager.
If your system meets these requirements, proceed to Ocient Application Installation.