It took Sun Microsystems Inc some considerable time to rig up its biggest StarFire server to beat the rest of the pack on TPC-C performance for a non-clustered system but yesterday reached pole position by publishing a result of 115,395 transactions per minute – or $105.63 per transaction – running a single instance of Oracle 8.1.5.1. It doesn’t come cheap though. If you really want to support 92,800 users, the total system cost over a five- year period is $12.19m.
The StarFire Enterprise 10000 uses 64 400MHz UltraSparc IIs and 64Gb memory running Solaris 7. Shipping in August, StarFire comes in above Compaq’s DEC AlphaServer 8400 (eight 12-way nodes) at 102,541 tpmC with eight database instances; Sequent’s 64-way NUMA-Q 2000 at 93,900 tpmC with 16 databases; and its chief rival, Hewlett-Packard’s 32-way V2500 at 92,832. The HP box costs $8.07m over five years and supports 74,880 users. Sun now touts StarFire’s performance relative to mainframe MIPS, at 3,000. The TPC-C test is based on the rudimentary online and batch data processing associated with running a warehouse (a real one, with forklifts, not a data warehouse), a relatively light workload compared to, say, SAP’s R/3 ERP suite.
