News

Fujitsu-Siemens Sets Benchmark on Datacenter Server

• By Scott Bekker
• 07/05/2000

The European OEM ran Datacenter Server with SQL Server 2000 on its 8-way Primergy N800 server to achieve 56,388.50 transactions per minute (tmpC) on the Transaction Processing Performance Council (www.tpc.org) TPC-C benchmark, which measures OLTP performance. Datacenter Server and SQL Server 2000 are both beta code.

The system from Fujitsu-Siemens (www.siemens.com) cost $19.56 per tmpC, a relatively low figure compared to benchmarks of large Unix servers. The leading Unix machine, an IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com) RS6000, blows away the Windows machine in terms of performance, with 135,815.70tpmC, but hits the pocketbook with a hefty $52.70 per tpmC.

The Fujitsu-Siemens Primergy N800 used eight 700MHz Pentium III Xeon processors and 32GB of RAM. The large storage array employs 144 9GB, 144 18GB, and 8 36GB hard drives, totaling 3,593GB of storage. Attached to the server were 8 700MHz Pentium III client boxes sending the information to the web.

Fujitsu-Siemens simulated 45,360 users on the system with client boxes running Windows 2000 Server and COM+.

Unisys Corp. (www.unisys.com) is the only other OEM to post Datacenter results. The 8-way Unisys e-@ction ES5085R weighed in with 48,767.76 tpmC and $20.13 per tpmC.

Unisys published its results five months ago using eight relatively poky 550MHz Xeons, and an earlier beta of Datacenter, suggesting that greater performance and economy is possible with a similar box.

While current Windows systems using one machine for the back-end database top out at eight processors, Windows 2000 Datacenter scales to 32 chips. Unisys has demonstrated Datacenter on its 32-processor ES7000 machine, but the company has not published a TPC-C benchmark.

Fujitsu-Siemens demonstrated its system today at Microsoft TechEd Europe in Amsterdam. Fujitsu-Siemens also demonstrated a 64-bit Itanium box.-Christopher McConnell