News
Windows 2000 Powers World's Fastest Server Cluster
IBM and Microsoft announced the world's fastest server
cluster for commercial use as measured by the TPC
Benchmark C.
IBM and Microsoft announced the world's fastest server
cluster for commercial use as measured by the TPC
Benchmark C. The cluster had a combination of 32 IBM
Netfinity 8500R servers running Windows 2000 Advanced
Server and IBM DB2 version 7.1 and 96 IBM Netfinity
5000 servers running Windows 2000 Server. The
configuration included 116 terabytes of physical disk
space constructed for high availability using RAID 1
and RAID 5 arrays.
The announcement came on the first day of TechEd Europe
2000, taking place in Amsterdam.
At the same time Microsoft said it has withdrawn results
that garnered a lot of press during the launch of
Windows 2000 in February. In that configuration,
eight-way Compaq ProLiant servers ran Win2K Advanced
Server along with beta versions of SQL Server 2000.
Microsoft said the numbers were withdrawn over a
"technicality" -- a "hard requirement" from the
Transaction Processing Performance Council that the
testing team was unaware of. The company said the Compaq
configuration would be run again and that the results
would be "back up very soon."
TPC-C Benchmark results measure maximum sustained
system performance as defined by how many new-order
transactions per minute a system generates while the
system executes four other transaction types (payment,
order status, delivery, and stock level). All five
TPC-C transactions have a certain user response time
requirement; the new order transaction response time is
set at five seconds.
The IBM-Microsoft benchmark tallied performance of
440,879 transactions per minute at a cost of $32.28 per
tpmC. The hardware cost was $14.2 million. While the
companies emphasized that this configuration provided
three times the performance of a comparably priced Sun
Microsystems cluster running Oracle 8i,
Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft actually hold the best
price/performance combination at $13.95 per tpmC; that
configuration consists of NetServer LH 6000 running SQL
Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition.
To learn more about the TPC-C Benchmark, visit
www.tpc.org.
-- Dian Schaffhauser, Executive Editor