News

Wintel Benchmark on IBM Servers Shatters TPC-C Record

• By Scott Bekker
• 07/05/2000

IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com) today announced the OLTP benchmark on the Transaction Processing Performance Council (www.tpc.org) TPC-C benchmark. The systems combined to achieve 440,879 transactions per minute (tpmC) at a cost per transaction of $32.28.

Brian Sanders, worldwide brand director for IBM’s Netfinity line of servers, used a jet analogy to compare the system to a Unix system from Sun Microsystems Inc. that got about 135,000 transactions for about $97 per transaction.

“We just built a jet plane that goes three times faster than the old jet but burns one third the fuel,” Sanders said.

Microsoft Corp. helped IBM design the system. Michel Gambier, group product manager of enterprise server marketing at Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) called the benchmark further validation of the scalability of Windows 2000. Gambier said the transaction rate would support 1.4 billion transactions per day. By comparison, Visa processes 25 billion transactions per year.

“That gives you an idea of the type of headroom you’ve got in that system,” Gambier said.

What IBM says about the Sun Solaris/Oracle systems, of course, also applies to IBM’s own Unix-based RS/6000 systems. IBM currently owns the TPC-C single-system raw performance lead with a 24-processor RS/6000 system (135,815 tpmC at $52.70/tpmC).

“There are a lot of other criteria that go into choosing a system – what you’re used to administering, where your applications come from,” Sanders said. “I think what this [benchmark] says is the industry standard server platform can now scale up.”

The IBM/Microsoft/Intel benchmark used Windows 2000 Advanced Server, IBM’s DB2 Enterprise-Extended Edition, Netfinity 8500R servers, and Intel Pentium III Xeon 700 MHz processors. Each Netfinity carried four processors, half of its eight-processor capacity. – Scott Bekker