News

NEC,Data General Unveil TPC-C Results on Clustered 8-ways

• By Scott Bekker
• 07/01/1999

The system reached 50,208.43 transactions per minute (tpmC) on the Transaction Processing Council (www.tpc.org) test for online transaction processing (OLTP) systems. NEC reached the results with four of its Express5800 HV8600 servers. Each had eight 500-MHz Intel Pentium III Xeon processors using 2 MB of L2 cache. The cluster relied on 10 CLARiiON FC5700 Fibre Channel disk storage systems from Data General that amounted to nearly 7 terabytes of storage.

Running on Windows NT 4.0, Enterprise Edition, the NEC servers ran Oracle8i database software.

NEC and Data General submitted the results to the TPC on June 29.

A week earlier, Unisys Corp. and Microsoft Corp. unveiled a 37,757.23 tpmC result on a single Unisys Aquanta 8-way machine with 550-MHz Intel Pentium III Xeon processors running Microsoft SQL Server 7.0.

Unisys and Microsoft arrived at their benchmark at considerably lower cost. That system cost $23.18 per tpmC compared with a $94.05 per tpmC cost for the NEC-Data General-Oracle system.

Major systems vendors are eager to show results approaching linear scalability for the long-delayed Intel 8-way system, expected out sometime in the third quarter. The scalability of non-Profusion systems has historically been disappointing.

The Unisys 8-way results improve upon what vendors were achieving recently with 4-way, single machine tests. Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp., Acer and Unisys all published results in the 23,000-25,000 tpmC range in the last few months with costs per tpmC in the $16 to $19 range. The 8-way is 1.5 times as fast as the fastest 4-way at less than 1.25 times the cost.

In early May, Compaq published TPC-C results with a 4-node cluster of 4-way servers running Oracle 8. The company returned results of 40,077.23 tpmC at $40.40 per tpmC. NEC-Data General’s results are 1.25 times as fast at 2.3 times the cost. -- Scott Bekker.