Guild Companies--HP Superdomes Break Through 1 Million TPM

Hewlett-Packard last week pierced the stratospheric 1 million transactions per minute (TPM) mark on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark, becoming the first vendor ever to hit that performance level with a database server running a single-system image. HP has been striving to put as much water as possible between its 64-way Superdome Integrity line of HP-UX, Windows, and Linux servers and the RISC/Unix servers of its rivals IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Fujitsu-Siemens and the Itanium servers from Unisys and NEC.

The latest HP benchmark test on the Superdome machines was, like other Integrity servers, using the "Madison" variant of the 64-bit Itanium processors from Intel. HP did a few things to squeeze the performance out of the machine used in its most recent test. First, it used HP-UX instead of Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition. HP-UX should always give a substantial performance boost over Windows on HP's own architected systems because of its intimate knowledge of those systems. It looks like HP was tuning HP-UX even after it posted nearly identical TPC-C benchmark results (cresting above 800,000 TPM) on the same Integrity machines.

Tuning is surely part of the story, but so is boosting the main memory on the Superdome from 512 GB to 1 TB. Back in the mid-1990s, when the TPC-A and TPC-B debit/credit benchmark was the one test that vendors used in order to gauge the relative performance of servers, machines had become large enough that they could essentially run these tests inside main memory. In a way, the benchmarks (as well as customer demands) had driven server makers to increase the capacity of their machines, and after a while, the I/O systems were not being stressed any more in such servers and the TPC-A and TPC-B tests had become obsolete as a gauge of system performance. Given that HP has almost doubled the performance of a 64-way Itanium 2 machine using the same 1.5 GHz Madison processors in the past several months, some people are beginning to question if the TPC-C test, which simulates order entry and supply chain applications, is as relevant as it used to be.

Think about it. At the launch for Windows Server 2003, on April 24, a 64-way Superdome could do 658,278 TPM on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark. The resulting price/performance of the first benchmark run on the Superdome Windows set up 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 an Itanium-Windows box, this is clearly what it is) has gotten below $10 per TPM. Last week, the same machine running HP-UX 11i and Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition was able to chew through 1,008,145 TPM at a cost of $8.33 per TPM after a staggering 48 percent discount on hardware, software, and maintenance. The Superdome server cost $7.1 million, with the 1 TB of main memory accounting for $5 million of the cost. HP-UX and Oracle 10g cost $1.4 million, and 38.3 TB of disk storage cost $5 million. Application server hardware and software made up the remaining $17.9 million of the cost of the Superdome set up tested. That tested configuration, by the way, will not be available until April 2004, probably when HP will support the larger memory.

In June, a 32-way "Regatta-H" pSeries 690 could handle 763,898 TPM running IBM's AIX variant of Unix and its own DB2 database. The Regatta-H server had 512 GB of main memory, and the whole shebang cost $10.7 million at list price. IBM then took out the red pen and chopped off 41 percent, with a large-systems discount, which dropped the cost of the machine to $8.31 per TPM. In mid-September, IBM ran the TPC-C test on the same 32-way pSeries 690, only this time running Oracle 10g on AIX. That machine could do 768,839 TPM at a cost of $8.55 per TPM, again after a hefty discount. IBM is said to be readying a 2 GHz Power4+ chip for the pSeries 690 machines by the end of 2003, which should deliver about 15 to 20 percent more performance on the TPC-C test, or around 900,000 TPM. If IBM boosts main memory on the machines to 1 TB, as HP did with the Superdomes, it could push performance on the TPC-C benchmark well above 1 million TPM. IBM then will be able to deliver the same performance as Superdome with half the number of processors. In a real world of CPU-based pricing schemes, this matters a lot.

Speaking of the real world, these big HP and IBM boxes are overkill for many IT shops, and small configurations of the 16-way ES7000 "Aries" Itanium servers from Unisys and the 32-way "AzuzA" servers from NEC are definitely in the running for the 64-bit enterprise server money. An ES7000/420 Aries server with 16 1.5 GHz "Madison" Itanium 2 processors, 128 GB of main memory, and 14 TB of disk capacity was able to crank through 291,411 TPM at a cost of $5.28 per TPM, and with a modest 16 percent discount. On price/performance, Unisys cleans HP's and IBM's clocks.

On the AzuzA server, which is sold as the Express5800/1320Xd, NEC recently showed that it can handle 577,531 TPM at a cost of $10.81 per TPM, running the SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition on Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition. That AzuzA machine has 32 of the top-end Madison Itanium 2 chips, plus 512 GB of main memory and 42 TB of disk capacity. The storage represented approximately half of the cost, and the whole shebang had a 25 percent discount off list price. (NEC could get into the same bang-for-the-buck range as IBM and HP if it discounted at their levels.) An AzuzA server running Windows 2003 and the Oracle 10g database was tested last month and was able to handle 521,441 TPM at a cost of $11.77 per TPM (after a 16 percent discount).