All Parties Advance in TPC-C Benchmarks - News Briefs

ENT, Oct 11, 2000 by Scott Bekker

Sun Microsystems Inc. recently broadened the lead that Unix-RISC systems enjoy over Windows 2000-Intel processor systems m the portion of the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) OLTP benchmark that analysts say counts most.

With a 64-processor Sun Starfire Enterprise 10000 running Sun Solaris 7 and Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 12.0.0.2, Sun (www.sun.com) posted a benchmark of 156,873 transactions per minute on the council's (www.tpc.org) TPC-C benchmark.

The figure ranks sixth among the top 10 TPC-C results by performance behind five scores engineered by Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) using Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Analysts from GartnerGroup Inc. (www.gartner.com) and other market research firms generally take a dim view of benchmarking, and have criticized Microsoft's efforts as being too convoluted for real-world database administrators (DBAs) to implement.

The top result of 440,879 tpmC uses 32 IBM Netfinity four-ways running DB2 7.1 on Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Rounding out the top five are four results using Windows 2000 Advanced Server and SQL Server 2000 on between eight and 12 Compaq Pro-Liant servers.

Sun's result uses one server, making it a system DBAs should be able to configure and manage. The system, including all clients and storage required to run the test, weighs in at $7.6 million or $48.81 per tpmC. It will be available in early 2001.

Compaq Computer Corp. (www.compaq.com) and Oracle Corp. (www.oracle.com) teamed up last month to run another single database system up the results lists. The pair goosed a 32-processor Compaq AlphaServer GS320 running Tru64 Unix up to 144,331 tpmC with Oracle 8.1.7 Enterprise Edition. That system cost $8.2 million, including about $1.3 million for 128 GB of RAM, for an overall price per transaction of $57.25.

Dell Computer Corp. (www.dell.com) is the latest to put together a single database-system result using Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, Microsoft's answer to the Unix/RISC competition. The old Microsoft story is reprised there: The pure performance is comparatively lower than Unix/RISC, but the cost is substantially better.

Dell's eight-processor PowerEdge 8450 running SQL Server 2000 achieved 57,014.93 tpmC, slightly better than one-third the performance of the Sun system. The total system cost of $854,106.40, however, gives the Dell-Microsoft combination an impressively low $14.99 tpmC.

Dell stacked its system with 32 GB of RAM, pushing Datacenter Server halfway to its limit of supporting 64 GB of RAM. Dell did not break out the cost of the memory in its summary report to the TPC.

Two factors mean the benchmarketing battles should continue to run hot in coming months.

For one, the capacity of Windows 2000 Datacenter Server isn't close to being tapped yet. Unisys Corp. (www.unisys.com) has yet to enter TPC-C results with its new ES7000 machine, which can run Windows 2000 Datacenter Server across 32 processors. That theoretical quadrupling of headroom puts Windows 2000 Datacenter Server in striking distance of the best Unix/RISC numbers.

At the same time, Sun released its long-overdue next generation of faster processors, which should give the Solaris camp a significant speed jump.