IBM, Intel, Microsoft Eclipse Sun Microsystems and Oracle With World's Fastest Commercial Server Cluster

Business Wire, July 5, 2000

Business & Technology Editors

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 5, 2000

IBM Netfinity(R) and DB2(R) Universal Database, Intel(R) Pentium(R)

III Xeon(TM)Processors, and Microsoft(R) Windows(R) 2000

Deliver 440,879 Transactions Per Minute

IBM, Intel and Microsoft today announced the world's fastest server cluster for commercial use, recording performance levels that triple the performance of Oracle running on a Sun Microsystems cluster, at one-third the price.*

Using the performance measurement technique agreed to by all computer makers (TPC-C), this alliance of leaders in industry standard computing achieved record-breaking results in server and price performance.**

"This benchmark constitutes a solution that will entirely bypass the normal glitches and costs of second implementations that accompany exponential transaction growth rates," said Marshall Freiman, CTO, Web Emporium LLC, an IBM customer. "It also offers scalability for e-businesses affected heavily by the transaction spikes associated with the holiday seasons. This is the type of cooperation between industry leaders that we should expect. With IBM, Intel and Microsoft making a move like this, others are bound to follow."

"Scalability concerns for e-businesses are a worry of the past," said Perry Cain, Vice President, Neoteric Solutions, also an IBM customer. "With this benchmark, we receive the cooperative efforts of IBM, Intel and Microsoft yielding a standardized and tested solution with double the transaction capabilities of anything else before. These technologies are no longer dreams of engineers."

IBM, Intel and Microsoft joined forces on this groundbreaking effort to prove that a combination of Netfinity Servers with Pentium(R) III Xeon(TM) processors running at 700 MHz (megahertz) with 2 MB (megabyte) L2 cache, IBM DB2 Universal Database and Microsoft(R) Windows(R) 2000 Advanced Server operating system provides a highly scalable environment. This technology combination is ideally suited for data-intensive applications like business-to-business (B2B), e-commerce and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

"With this record-breaking event, IBM has once again demonstrated the power of DB2, and has raised the bar for industry-standard servers with Netfinity," said Ralph Martino, vice president, strategy and marketing, IBM Personal Systems Group. "IBM's strong, productive relationship with Microsoft and Intel, and our collective ability to achieve extraordinary results as we did with this benchmark, is changing the way the world views industry-standard computing."

"Achieving strong industry-standard benchmark results is one of the leading ways to show the industry and our customers that Windows 2000 is a highly scalable operating system for mission critical enterprise deployments," said Jim Ewel, marketing vice president for IT infrastructure and hosting at Microsoft. "Beyond the numbers, this benchmark effort illustrates our commitment to working with IBM and Intel to deliver to customers the largest and most reliable enterprise-class solutions."

"This breakthrough performance on Intel-based servers and achieved by IBM's Netfinity 8500R server showcases the incredible scalability of our large cache Pentium III Xeon processors," said Raghu Murthi, director of marketing for Intel's Enterprise Platform Group. "Intel-based servers are designed for large enterprise class implementations and we worked closely with IBM and Microsoft to deliver outstanding performance and solutions tailored to meet the rapidly growing e-Business economy."

Benchmark Configuration Details

-------------------------------

The configuration included an unprecedented 116 terabytes of physical disk space configured for high availability using RAID 1 and RAID 5 arrays.

The Netfinity 8500R servers, containing Netfinity X-Architecture features adopted from IBM S/390(R) and RS/6000(R) servers, contributed to this benchmark's success. Specific features that convinced the benchmark team the servers were up to the test include the 8500R's expansive memory, the number of processors supported, the number of PCI slots available for add-on components and the amount of LAN I/O for the transfer of data in and out of the system. In addition, the setup utilizes Giganet cLAN interconnects for fast server-to-server communications.

Key components of the cluster included:

-- IBM Netfinity servers and DB2 Universal Database, visit www.ibm.com

-- Intel, visit www.intel.com

-- 4GB ECC SDRAM memory per server -- Eight IBM Netfinity ServeRAID-3HB Ultra2 SCSI Adapters per server -- 96 IBM Netfinity 5000 servers were used as TPC-C clients for the

Web-serving, Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server on each

client. -- Two 9.1 GB (gigabyte) 10K Ultra 160 SCSI drives and 218 18.2GB 10K

Wide Ultra SCSI drives per server -- One EtherJet 10/100 PCI Management Adapter per server -- 2 Giganet cLAN 5300 switches

DB2 Universal Database

----------------------

Today's announcement highlights IBM's leadership in the database market. DB2 demonstrated record-breaking results in transactions and in the ability to manage the world's largest database of more than 116 TB of online storage - this is equivalent to a stack of paper 3,480 miles high.