Unisys ES7000 Hits Performance Sweet Spot, 165,219 tpmC — as Much as Enterprises Need, at Half the Price of Proprietary UNIX/RISC Servers

Business Wire, Nov 12, 2001

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

BLUE BELL, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2001

Windows Datacenter Server Limited Edition, SQL Server 2000

Enterprise Edition, and Intel Pentium III Xeon processors on Unisys

ES7000 deflate UNIX claims of performance superiority

Remember when the high prices of UNIX/RISC-based servers could be excused by citing the level of performance they delivered?

The achievement by the Unisys e-@ction Enterprise Server ES7000 of 165,218.71 transactions per minute (tpmC) makes such rationalizations increasingly difficult to recall, and now impossible to defend.

At a price per transaction of $21.33, the Unisys ES7000 -- running Windows Datacenter Server -- is half the cost of the server it replaces as the industry's sixth fastest non-clustered system ever tested using the TPC-C benchmark methodology.

With this announcement, the Unisys ES7000 sets another new world record for a single server based on Microsoft and Intel technology. The Unisys ES7000 is the only server based on Microsoft and Intel technology, and the only server using 32-bit processors, on the top-ten list of non-clustered TPC-C performers.

Far from a theoretical laboratory measurement, the 165,218.71 tpmC mark demonstrates the Unisys ES7000's ability to support the workloads typically experienced in high-volume online transaction environments. Examples include financial services and banking, transportation, telecommunications and government.

"For our customers, the performance range simulated in this test approximates the real-world requirements of keeping a transaction-intensive enterprise cranking," said Mark Feverston, vice president, Unisys Server Programs. "So for us, it means we're hitting the performance sweet spot of our market of choice while cutting by half the costs of entry into this demanding class of computing."

The TPC-C benchmark, based on the Transaction Processing Council's "C" methodology for measuring online transaction processing (OLTP) performance, is the industry's standard measure of computer power.

This benchmark result is only the latest of a growing body of objective evidence that Unisys, Microsoft and Intel have removed the last economic barriers to the class of high-performance computing on which so many enterprises rely.

"In a relatively short period of time, Microsoft, Unisys and Intel have broken through and are now among the performance leaders for large enterprise server solutions with the Windows Server Family," said Peter Conway, senior director of the Windows .NET Server Solutions Group at Microsoft Corp. "We are pleased to continue delivering on the promise we made to our enterprise customers at the .NET Enterprise Server launch one year ago. Enterprises can deploy their mission- and business-critical workloads, which demand the highest degree of scalability and reliability. Those customers will also benefit from the superior business value offered by this industry-standard computing architecture."

"In a relatively short period of time, Microsoft, Unisys and Intel have broken through and are now among the performance leaders for large enterprise server solutions with the Windows .NET Server Family," said Pete Conway, senior director of the Windows .NET Server Solutions Group at Microsoft Corp. "We are pleased to continue delivering on the promise we made to our enterprise customers at the .NET Enterprise Server launch one year ago. Enterprises can deploy their mission- and business-critical workloads that demand the highest degree of scalability and reliability while taking advantage of the superior business value offered by this industry-standard computing architecture."

Comparisons of the performance and price/performance ratings of competing high-end servers with those achieved by the Unisys ES7000 can be accessed through the Unisys TPC-C Benchmark Ticker/Savings Calculator, available on the World Wide Web at www.unisys.com/hw/servers/es7000/press-release.asp.> A broad array of Unisys ES7000 design features provide exceptionally efficient access to data, positioning the system as a high-performance, cost-effective database server for very-high-volume transaction processing.

These features include unique directory-based cache consistency, fast crossbar communication paths, large third-level cache, and other accelerators that overcome latency, maximize scalability and increase system bandwidth.

The test configuration is based on a Unisys ES7000 with 32 Intel 900-MHz Pentium III Xeon processors, 64 Gbytes of memory, Emulex VI networking solutions and EMC storage. The configuration includes Microsoft's forthcoming release of its Windows Datacenter Server Limited Edition operating system and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition database with Service Pack 2.

The complete configuration will be available March 10, 2002; the ES7000 and SQL Server 2000 are available today.

The Unisys Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) server architecture on which the ES7000 is based is the only architecture available that takes advantage of the Microsoft operating system's ability to use 32 processors. This ability is particularly advantageous for enterprises relying on very large, transaction-oriented databases.