News
Itanium System Breaks 1 Million Transactions on TPC-C
- By Scott Bekker
- 11/06/2003
HP, Intel and Oracle crossed a psychological performance threshold this week when their Itanium/HP-UX/Oracle10g system achieved more than 1 million transactions per minute on the industry-standard OLTP scalability benchmark, the TPC-C.
The benchmark is another proof point for the scalability of Intel's Itanium 2 processors, which now claim the top three spots on the TPC-C benchmark, run by the Transaction Processing Performance Council. IBM Power 4 processors occupy the fourth and fifth positions.
The result also widens the performance gap between scale-up Unix/Oracle and scale-up Windows/SQL on HP's own 64-processor Integrity Superdome system. HP is now getting 28 percent better performance with its own Unix operating system and Oracle's new 10G database on the system than it got with Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition, and SQL Server 2000, Enterprise Edition. Both the Unix and Windows software stacks used in the tests are 64-bit.
Windows, on the other hand, slightly widened its price-performance advantage with the latest HP-UX/Oracle run costing $8.33 per transaction per minute (tpmC) -- up from a previous HP-UX/Oracle run that cost $8.28. The Windows/SQL combination cost $6.49 per tpmC.
The HP system used in the most recent test will be available April 14. The entire configuration cost $8.4 million.
With the announcement, HP notes that it holds the top TPC-C performance results for Unix, Linux and Windows. The top Linux result is pretty far out of the competition for scale-up bragging rights. At 136,111 tpmC, the Linux system has about 14 percent of the performance of the Unix system and 17 percent of the performance of the Windows system.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.