News

IBM Shows Off W2K on Web Transaction Benchmark

• By Scott Bekker
• 06/05/2001

IBM Corp. ran a test on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-W benchmark for proving transactional Web performance.

While Windows 2000 Server systems have been used several times in a subcategory for smaller systems, Big Blue ran a Windows 2000 server for the first time in the 100,000 item inventory class for the TPC-W in a result posted May 31.

The relatively young benchmark requires complex configurations involving Web servers, caching servers, database servers, load balancing servers and other elements.

IBM anchored its test on an eight-way IBM xSeries 370 server running 900 MHz Intel Pentium III Xeons, 4 GB RAM, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and SQL Server 2000. IBM also used Microsoft's Internet Information Services 5.0, Internet Security & Acceleration Server 2000 and Microsoft ISAPI in its setup.

The test is IBM's third in the 100,000 item inventory class, and predictably the Microsoft result trails the performance of IBM's own NUMA-Q system running IBM DB2 7.1 on DYNIX/ptx 4.5.1 and its xSeries 430 running DB2 7.2 on IBM ptx 4.6.1. The xSeries 430 clocked 7,554 Web interactions per second (WIPS), the NUMA-Q reached 6,272 WIPS and the Windows 2000 system hit 6,045 WIPS.

Presumably IBM ran the benchmark to bolster its consulting and services organization's chances to win complex accounts involving Microsoft technologies. Still, the Windows system plays to its traditional strength of price/performance. Its $76.67/WIPS compares favorably to the $195.95/WIPS for NUMA-Q and $136.80/WIPS for the xSeries 430.

Four benchmarks have been published for Windows 2000 Server on a smaller version of the TPC-W test for 10,000 item inventories. The TPC-W can be run for inventories ranging from 1,000 to 10 million items, although only 10,000-item and 100,000-item tests have been run so far.