System Administration
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Install an Ocient System
Installation Reference

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.

Server Hardware Requirements

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.

Foundation, Loader, and SQL Nodes

Component

Requirements

Notes

Chassis/System

8+ NVMe hotswap bays

Dual CPUs

M.2 slot for OS drive

Redundant power supplies

 SYS-120U-TNR recommended

Full bandwidth PCIe connections to NVMe drives recommended (i.e. not multiplexed).

NVMe PCIe lanes balanced between CPUs recommended (i.e. equal number of drives connected to CPU1 and CPU2).

CPU

2x Intel 6348 or similar x86-64 server CPU

26+ cores recommended.

 Skylake or AMD Rome or newer architecture.

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 NIC

Mellanox ConnectX-5 MCX516A-CCAT recommended.

Dual ports required for redundancy.

OS Drive

1TB+ Enterprise NVMe drive (M.2)

M.2 format recommended to keep all U.2 bays available for data drives.

Data Drives

NVMe drives for short term and long term data storage.

Metadata Nodes

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.

Data Drive Requirements

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.

  •  D5-P5430 OPAL U.2 3.84TB-15.36TB
  • Solidigm D7-P5520 OPAL U.2 1.92 TB-15.36TB
  • Solidigm D7-P5510 OPAL U.2 3.84TB, 7.68TB
  •  PM9A3 U.2 960GB-15.36TB
    

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.

Compatible Operating System Versions

These operation systems and versions are fully supported by Ocient:

  •  version 8*
  •  20.04
  •  11

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.

Network Requirements

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.

Redundancy

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.

Network Switch

These are the requirements for the network switches to support Ocient. No other advanced L2 or L3 features are required.

  1. Enough 100G ports for all Foundation nodes on the same backplane for best performance.
  2. Multi-chassis link aggregation for redundancy (MLAG/CLAG/MCLAG depending on vendor terminology).

Security Requirements

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

Additional Software Requirements

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.

Next Steps

If your system meets these requirements, proceed to Ocient Application Installation.