Unisys Bests 16-way IBM xSeries 440 with Aggressive ES7000 Performance, Pricing

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

During the past year that IBM has been shipping its "Vigil" xSeries 440 Pentium 4 Xeon MP servers, Big Blue and Unisys have been slugging it out in the 16-way Wintel space that both are trying to dominate. This week, Unisys landed a good punch on IBM's jaw with a TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark that shows its new "Dylan" 16-way ES7000 Orion 540 machine besting IBM's 16-way Vigil server by 19 percent on performance at a price that is 35 percent lower.

Both machines were tested using the same 2 GHz "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors. Both machines had 64 GB of main memory. Both machines were running Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. The Unisys machine had 7.4 TB of disk capacity, compared to the 10.4 TB in the IBM machine. This helped the ES7000's price/performance a bit since that extra disk capacity cost about $550,000 on the IBM machine (IBM had more disk on the box and charges more per GB for the disks it used). The xSeries 440 with 16 processors was tested at the end of March and showed a performance of 151,744 transactions per minute (TPM). The database and application servers in the test cost $1.67 million (including three year's of maintenance) after a 13.5 percent discount, yielding a price performance of $11.03 per TPM.

The Unisys ES7000 Orion 540 server, which is really a cluster of two eight-way Dylan servers, was able to handle 181,281 TPM with the same number and type of processors. Unisys not only spent less on storage in its test, but somehow is charging less for the Microsoft software stack and is charging less for associated support services, too. If you took away the disk and Microsoft software pricing factors (which you can't really do), the xSeries 440 and ES7000 Orion 540 would have roughly the same price. But the Unisys box was able to do 19 percent more work, and there is no explanation of this coming from either Unisys or IBM, although people are scratching their heads. One guess is that the xSeries 440 is a NUMA-esque cluster of four-way Gallatin cell boards, while the Dylan server that was tested is based on two eight-way cell boards that may present more of an SMP profile to Windows Server 2003. Then again, it could just be a lot of tuning tricks, and that might mean IBM will pull a few tricks out of its bag next.

In any event, the ES7000 Orion 540 turned in a price/performance of $5.85 per TPM, which is very tough to beat in the 16-way space. The ES7000 server and Microsoft software stack for TPC-C database server cost $529,586, and with application servers and maintenance thrown in, the whole enchilada cost just under $1.1 million after a 14 percent discount. Your move, IBM.

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