News

Unisys Scale-up Benchmarking Progresses to 24 Processors

• By Scott Bekker
• 03/26/2001

This time the result was for a 24-processor system. It follows an SAP SD benchmark on a 16-processor system Unisys published exactly one month ago.

The SAP benchmarks are the closest thing to industry standard benchmarks Unisys has made public on its year-old systems that can scale to 32 processors, the limit of Windows 2000 Datacenter Server's capability.

Unisys officials have said they are preparing an ES7000 system for a Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) benchmark, which is widely considered the most open and credible back-end scalability benchmark.

With the 24-processor server running Datacenter Server and SQL Server 2000, Unisys achieved 14,400 SAP benchmark users. With a 16-processor system, the Unisys CMP system supported 10,400 users.

"We achieved 38 percent performance improvement with a 50 percent increase in the number of processors on the database server used in our earlier SAP SD benchmark configuration," Mark Feverston, vice president of Unisys Server Programs, said in a statement.

The comparison is credible because although Intel made a new 900 MHz Xeon processor available last week, both tests were run on 700 MHz Xeons.

The 24-way result nearly doubles the best eight-processor result run using Windows 2000. Compaq hit 7,500 SAP SD users a year ago with an eight-way, also running 700 MHz Xeons.

The result does not change the Windows platform's position relative to other platforms on the SAP SD benchmark.

Unisys trails two Solaris-Oracle systems and an IBM AIX-DB2 system at 23,000 users, 19,360 users and 16,640 users respectively.

With the headroom Unisys has available to it -- eight processors and the 900 MHz Xeons -- the company is in striking distance of a top SAP SD result on its next rev of the benchmark.

Unisys also didn't quite hit full processor utilization on the database server this time around. The 16-way run last month ran at 99 percent utilization with 49 eight-processor application servers. The 24-processor system hummed along at 89 percent utilization while serving 73 of the application servers.

Compaq, Dell, HP and others resell Unisys' CMP technology under their own brand names. --