Frequently Asked Questions

benchANT is company striving to enable data-driven decision making by proving decision makers, product owners, and marketing departments an easy-to-use solution for measuring the capabilities of complex, cloud-based systems. Herewith, benchANT's main focus lies on all types of Cloud-hosted Database Management Systems (DBMS) be they run on Infrastructure-as-a-Service, as a managed service, or as a Database-as-a-Service. Yet, with a sophisticated technology stack in-place we are also able to address servers, storage systems, and message queues. benchANT's approach is to perform batches of benchmarks to evaluate the performance of different technologies, different cloud providers, and different hardware/software configurations. Performance here not only includes classical performance metrics such as throughput, but can also include further non-functional properties such as availability. The data gained through benchmarking can be used to address many problems including capacity planning, optimization, cost reduction, and forecasting.

Load testing aims evaluating the system behaviour under an anticipated load and compare the results with the expected (or required) outcome. Based on the comparison between should and is, it can be decided whether or not to keep a software build / software configuration or not. The goal of software stress testing, however, is to identify the saturation point and the first bottleneck of the application under test. In that respect benchmarking can be used as both stress and load test. Yet, usually, benchmarking is also used to produce statistically significant outcomes when comparing the performance of two different systems under test. Furthermore, benchmarks should come with a clear methodology of how to measure, what to measure, and how to evaluate the data.

For the majority of users, we recommend the use of our Professional Service at least for the first few projects. Doing so, you benefit from our years of experience when it comes to planning, configuring, and setting up benchmarks leading to a way higher benchmarking quality. Due to our high level of automation when it comes to benchmarking, only a few consulting hours are required for the the services. For well-trained users, users that have run multiple projects with us, and users that have experience in database benchmarking, we can also open up the self-service API of our platform. The good thing is, the first consulting hour are free of charge so that you can find out if your expertise suffices or not without any risk.

1. Assessment meeting: Discussion of objectives, technologies, workload, and budget. Usually for free. 2. Tailored, individual offer. 3. Execution of measurements (often in iterative steps). 4. Discussion of results. 5. Project closing or planning of next project.

The total cost of a benchmarking project consists of the number of configurations to benchmark, hours of consulting services / programming effort needed (e.g. integration work), cloud costs. We provide a unique credit-based pricing framework for all of these activities.

Besides their benchmarking capabilities, benchANT offer several further services. These include • Write-up service: We write a whitepaper for you based on our results • Our data infrastructure consulting services cover all aspects of data storage and data access. We emphasize data-driven decision-making and performance/cost considerations. • Cloud migration: Should you plan to migrate your data(base) to a cloud service we are here to support you. Our services include the choice of database technology, cloud provider, service model, and cloud resource. • Data centre migration: You moved to the cloud, but had to find out that it does not suit you? We support you when migrating back to on-prem or third party data centres. We even cover the case of server and storage selection. • Database migration: in case you want to get rid of legacy systems including Oracle we help you by finding out which other technology is required at what configuration. We also extend your migration workforce.