IBM Sets Transaction Processing World Record

IBM’s RS/6000 S80 Enterprise Server has set a new world-record for transaction processing performance.

Based on the TPC-C benchmark, the S80 is the world's most powerful single-server system for transaction processing. In addition, Transaction Processing Performance Council results show a single S80 system with 24 microprocessors can perform almost as many transactions as a cluster of four 24-processor Sun E6500 servers (96 microprocessors in total).

The S80 is also the best value among large enterprise servers with the lowest cost per transaction among the 10 most powerful systems. The S80 performed 126,671 transactions per minute (tpmC) at $58.12 per transaction ($/tpmC), 44 percent better performance for the dollar than the Sun E10000, and 40 percent better than Sun’s cluster result.

The test was performed using the IBM UNIX operating system, AIX 4.3.3, and the Oracle 8i version 8.1.6 database. Joseph Clabby of Aberdeen Group said, "With these outstanding results, the new S80 clearly assumes performance leadership. It should be considered for the short list in any UNIX server decision."

Commercial customers have traditionally used the TPC-C test as a principle metric for comparing systems that run demanding enterprise-wide applications.

"We designed the S80 to host the world's most demanding workloads and that is exactly what it does," said Debra Thompson, vice president of IBM RS/6000 products and solutions. "The S80 and AIX provide not only leading performance, but also superior affordability, scalability and availability."

"We want our customers to know how well Oracle and RS/6000 servers perform together," said David Dargo, vice president of the IBM Products Division at Oracle. "These results are the culmination of several recent benchmarks which demonstrate that Oracle8 and the S80 deliver the performance required by our customers' most demanding applications."

Today’s TPC-C result is the seventh industry-leading benchmark published for the RS/6000 S80. For detailed product specifications and performance information please visit www.rs6000.ibm.com/hardware/enterprise/s80_specs.html.

These results demonstrate clearly that IBM's long-standing technology and marketing alliance with Oracle delivers customer value. MidAmerican Energy Holding Corp., of Des Moines, Iowa, a leader in the supply and distribution of energy with more than 3.3 million electricity and gas customers, runs Oracle8 and Oracle Financials on an RS/6000 S70 server. "Application uptime is critical to our business," said Chris Trickel, Unix technical service manager at MidAmerican. "We performed extensive reliability testing to see if we could crash the application. I’m happy to say that we couldn’t. Both performance and dependability of our RS/6000 system running Oracle has been outstanding. We know we made the right choice and are looking forward to the increased performance offered by the RS/6000 S80 system."

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