Tandem Computers Inc has teamed up with MicroStrategy Inc to benchmark test joint decision support systems offerings in a bid to set industry standards for the future. The companies carried out two stress tests, simulating the scalability of enterprise data warehouse access by feigning the workload and connectivity of some 40,000 users in a web-enabled decision support environment running on a Windows NT server. Simulated personal computer clients ran an internet application connected to a Tandem S1000 NT server running MicroStrategy’s DSS Web and DSS Server software. The server was connected to a data warehouse running Tandem’s NonStop SQL/MP database engine on a Tandem Himalaya K20008 parallel processing machine. Two tests were carried out and the results audited by Ernst & Young. The results of the tests suggested that the workload performance achieved, was between 10 and 40 times greater than demand generally placed on such a system by a large retailer at present. Stress tests found 40,000 web users, with 100% caching, could run more than 2.8 million reports a month, or 10,000 web users could run some 670,000 reports a month, uncached, directly against the data warehouse. The tests also demonstrated what the companies described as outstanding query performance running against a 200Gb or more data warehouse containing 4 billion rows of data. MicroStrategy said as customers and users look to higher performance systems, they are wanting to see scientific data to back up a system vendor’s claims. We really think we will be able to show we can support over 100,000 users. Tandem said of the test findings, We want it to be the de facto standard for decision support and we don’t think anyone will get anywhere near it.
