HP Gets Over 100,000 TPM On V2500s >BY Timothy Prickett Morgan

Computergram International, Sept 20, 1999

While IBM Corp was busy bragging last week that it would be the OLTP benchmark leader with the RS/6000 S80 "Condor" servers when it announces results for the machines in a few weeks, Hewlett-Packard Co has gone back to the labs and redone its tests on the 32- way V2500s it first tested on the TPC-C benchmark test back in early August.

At that time, the V2500 running Oracle8i V8.1.5 and HP-UX 11 with extension pack 9903 was able to crank through 92,834 TPM at a cost of $88 per TPM. This time around, HP threw on Sybase Adaptive Server 12.0, enterprise edition, and a new extension pack (9911) for HP-UX and was able to squeeze another 10% more performance out of the V2500s. Even though the configuration and the cost of the V2500 server used in the TPC-C test was virtually unchanged, HP used fewer client machines in the middle application tier of the TPC-C setup and a substantially less expensive data base - Oracle cost $976,204 plus $975,840 for five year's maintenance, which cost a lot more than the $274,992 license fee plus $244,316 for maintenance on the Sybase data base - and consequently got its price per TPM on the TPC-C test down to $63 per TPM.

That price is significantly lower than the $106 per TPM of Sun Starfire and probably about where IBM is shooting with its S80 configuration, although Big Blue is only saying that it expects to be under $80 per TPM with its S80.