News

Unisys Gets Best Score on SAP Benchmark

• By Scott Bekker
• 10/23/2001

SAP's quasi-industry standard benchmark, SAP Standard Application Sales & Distribution (SD), has been Unisys arena of choice for proving its cellular multi-processing (CMP) server architecture that is designed to drive up the scalability of Windows operating systems and Intel processors.

The numbers published Monday represent Unisys' fifth run on the SAP benchmark, with each effort improving on the last.

The Unisys ES7000, equipped with 32 Pentium III Xeon 900 MHz processors, 12 GB of RAM, SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition, and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, supported 24,000 concurrent SAP users in the test. The massive database server was supported by 99 application servers, all eight-processor machines, in the test.

The number beat the previous record-holder, a Fujitsu/Siemens system running Sun's Solaris operating system that supported 23,000 users.

The Unisys result improves upon its last effort -- 20,000 concurrent users on the benchmark back in June. Unisys first 32-processor attempt at the SAP benchmark reached 18,500 users in April. The company first ran the SAP benchmark on one of its machines with 16 processors, then later ran it with 24 processors as it worked its way up to filling the box to its 32-processor capacity.

Enhancements to I/O systems, such as faster disks and disk adapters as well as experience in implementing the benchmark account for the performance increase between Unisys' last run and the current one, a spokesman said. For example, the recent benchmark run uses seven more application servers in the three-tier test configuration than the June run did.

Analyst Robert Dorin with the Aberdeen Group says the benchmark, with the system's price-performance and reliability characteristics, shows the system is an alternative to Unix/RISC systems. "This latest SAP benchmark result on the Unisys ES7000 reinforces our belief that Windows- and Intel-based servers achieve the highest levels of performance for strategic enterprise applications like mySAP.com," Dorin said in a statement.