IBM Announces DB2 and POWER6 Combo Trounces HP and Sun by 2x and 3x Respectively in New Business Intelligence Benchmark

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that its recently introduced E7100 Balanced Warehouse(TM), consisting of the IBM POWER6(TM) processor-based System p(TM) 570 server, the IBM System Storage(TM) DS4800 and DB2® Warehouse 9.5, is already lapping the field in performance. The new data warehousing solution is now ranked number one in both performance and in price/performance in the TPC-H business Intelligence performance benchmark (1), outshining HP and Sun.

--  2 x speed-up over HP system with Oracle 10g and equal number of cores;
    (2)
--  3.17 x speed up over Sun with Oracle 10g and 38 percent price
    advantage; (3)
--  A new world record by loading 10 terabytes (TB) data at six TB per
    hour. (4)

"These latest benchmark results further prove IBM's strength and leadership in the business intelligence arena," said Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy, IBM Power Systems. "The E7100 Balanced Warehouse is a complete data warehousing solution comprised of pre-tested, scalable and fully integrated system and storage components, designed to get customers up and running quickly to get to the real benefit of unprecedented business insight and intellect."

With expanded solutions optimized to meet the entire spectrum of warehousing requirements, IBM recently added the E7100 Balanced Warehouse to its E-Class portfolio, which is optimized for large scale enterprise data warehouses. The E7100 Balanced Warehouse exploits POWER6 technology in System p on AIX®, IBM's UNIX® operating system, along with IBM System Storage DS4800 and DB2 Warehouse. This offering can accommodate higher levels of concurrency as well as significant fluctuations in workload, providing ultimate scalability and performance for the most demanding enterprise data warehouses.

IBM has done the hard work for customers by creating a base data warehouse module that has balanced price/performance with the appropriate amount of CPU cores and memory for 2 terabytes (TB) of storage -- nothing more or less than is needed for each. Then IBM created higher performing 2TB data server modules and other optional modules that can easily be added to snap together larger data warehouses that are also balanced in performance with the appropriate CPU, memory and storage. One base module with 24 2TB add-on data server modules can easily be configured, ordered and installed to create a 50TB balanced warehouse. Customers working with IBM have built balanced data warehouses of over 300TB or more using these pre-tested, pre-configured building blocks.

DB2 Warehouse 9.5 breaks new ground in business intelligence, delivering an industry-first combination of advanced, embedded analytics and high performance that enables organizations to gain greater value from their information that was previously unavailable from conventional data warehouse products.

About TPC-H

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), a not-for-profit organization, was founded to define transaction processing and database performance benchmarks, such as the TPC-C, TPC-H, and TPC-W benchmarks, and to disseminate objective performance data based on these benchmarks. TPC benchmarks have extremely stringent requirements, including both reliability and durability tests, and must undergo an independent audit. Council members include most major database vendors and suppliers of server hardware systems.

The TPC benchmark(TM)H (TPC-H) is a decision support benchmark. It consists of a suite of business oriented ad-hoc queries and concurrent data modifications. The queries and the data populating the database have been chosen to have broad industry-wide relevance. This benchmark illustrates decision support systems that examine large volumes of data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and give answers to critical business questions.

The performance metric reported by TPC-H is called the TPC-H Composite Query-per-Hour Performance Metric (QphH@Size), and reflects multiple aspects of the capability of the system to process queries. These aspects include the selected database size against which the queries are executed, the query processing power when queries are submitted by a single stream, and the query throughput when queries are submitted by multiple concurrent users. The TPC-H Price/Performance metric is expressed as $/QphH@Size.

About IBM System p servers

Renowned for their computing power, IBM System p servers support user needs across a broad range of applications, including transaction processing, web publishing, data mining, systems management and others. This family of 1-to 64-core IBM Power processor-based systems is designed to provide customers with features for high performance, scalability and dynamic resource allocation, together with leadership features designed for high availability. Unique IBM virtualization features allow users to process more information on a single server, creating the potential to save on total cost of system ownership, as well as space and energy costs.