Guild Companies

Hewlett-Packard has become king of the hill again on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test with its forthcoming 64-way Itanium-based Superdome server. The Superdome, which was running the new Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition from Microsoft, has bested IBM's 32-way "Regatta-H" pSeries 690, which is using the new Power4+ processors. How long HP will hold the top spot is unclear, with IBM said to be working on its own revised benchmark that will put it atop HP's latest result.

The two Superdome servers that HP tested had exactly the same configuration and price. They were configured with 64 of the 1.5 GHz/6 MB cache "Madison" processors, which are expected to ship this summer from Intel. The Superdomes had 512 GB of main memory. The central electronics complex of this Superdome cost around $2.2 million, the main memory another $3.3 million, and $2 million of the core server coming from the 34.6 TB of disk storage and related peripherals. The 64-bit versions of the Windows 2003 Server Datacenter Edition operating system and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition database cost $1.3 million on these Superdomes. Including application servers and three years of maintenance, the Superdomes cost $10.5 million. But then HP invoked a Large Systems Discount of 38.5 percent, and dropped the price tag of these servers down to $6.5 million.

To make the debut of Windows Server 2003 on April 24, the best that the techies at HP's performance labs could do was 658,278 transactions per minute (TPM) on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark, which simulates order entry and supply chain applications. The resulting price/performance of the first benchmark run on the Superdome Windows setup yielded a bang for the buck of $9.80, which is the first time that an enterprise server in the RISC/Unix class of machine (even though it is Itanium-Windows box, this is clearly what it is) has gotten below $10 per TPM. On the second run, announced last week, HP was able to push 707,102 TPM, an increase of 7 percent over the first pass. That increased throughput, which was entirely due to tuning, dropped the price/performance of the Superdome Windows setup to $9.13 per TPM. Why these machines will not be available until October 23 is unclear. Microsoft says that all implementations (32-bit Pentium or 64-bit Itanium) and editions of Windows Server 2003 are shipping.

Incidentally, sources at HP that I spoke to say that they can do even better in terms of throughput on a Superdome Itanium server running its own HP-UX Unix operating system, which also runs on the same machine. Exactly when HP is going to prove this is unclear, but the company may be keeping some of its powder dry for the aftermath of IBM's next Regatta benchmark, which is expected to be configured running Oracle9i and which is probably going to hit somewhere in the range of 720,000 TPM with essentially the same hardware configuration as the DB2 Universal Database setup IBM just announced two weeks ago. HP is expected to ship HP-UX v2 for Itanium at the end of July, and this may be when it announces such benchmarks. This timing for the new HP-UX is probably not a coincidence and is probably when the Madison chip will launch.

That IBM Regatta-H server was configured with AIX 5L V5.2 and IBM's DB2 Universal Database 8.1 software. The server had 32 1.7 GHz Power4+ processor cores (with a 1.5 MB shared, on-chip L2 cache for every two cores), 512 MB of L3 cache, 512 GB of main memory, and 43 TB of IBM's 7103 SSA disk arrays. That Regatta setup server could do 680,613 TPM. The pSeries 690 server cost $3.27 million, with $1.38 million going for main memory alone and $1.4 million going for processors. The SSA disk subsystems cost $6.86 million, and AIX and DB2 for the server cost $632,725. With application servers and three years of maintenance thrown in, the whole TPC-C configuration had a list price of $14.57 million, but after a 48 percent discount, the price of the whole shebang dropped to $7.57 million. When you do the math, IBM was able to show a price/performance of $11.13 per TPM after the discounts. This configuration will be available on November 8. Why it is not available right now is unclear.

No matter when the updated Regatta server is available, IBM is obviously counting on the fact that on real-world workloads a lower processor count is going to make Regatta appealing against Superdome regardless of the spread on the TPC-C benchmark. Processor count is important for application pricing and on single threaded jobs, like batch applications, the speed of a single processor is often as important than aggregate OLTP throughput in a box. That said, IBM is probably shooting for under $10 per TPM on the next Regatta TPC-C benchmark, just to give HP trouble.

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