Atlanta start-up Client Server Labs has upgraded its benchmarking software to handle bigger databases and more clients, renamed it RPM/dbs and pretty much doubled its price to $25,000. The old RPMark95 suite that it inherited from IBM at the company’s inception last year is still available, it’s just that they thought they had to move onwards and upwards to predict the behaviors of bigger workloads. The benchmark still uses the Transaction Processing Council’s TPC/C benchmark to measure OLTP and yet paradoxically competes with its TPC/D decision support mark which it derides as only able to emulate a 100 megabyte database using one client. The new RPM/dbs runs against a server database of 10 gigabytes using up to 49 client machines emulating a client workload of 450 real clients.We understand that the TPC considered a TPC/S (S for server) benchmark at its last committee meeting, that would have been very similar but this was rejected, said Curtis Franklin, a CS Labs director. Franklin pointed at what he presumed was a decision by committee, a favored snub to a benchmarking organization made up of suppliers with vested interests. The $25,000 tag is only for a full set of tests carried out by CS Labs and verified so that they can be published under the Client Server Labs name, the actual software costs just $2,500. Meanwhile, CS Labs future direction involves a shift outside of pure client server into testing internet servers, watch for Sun and Silicon Graphics results, and the building of a set of tests for the huge database sizes of data warehouses when accessed by an increasing number of attached terminals.
