However fleeting kudos may be in the fast paced server market, IBM can rightfully claim that its S/390 G5 series of mainframe servers are the fastest web servers on market. According to just-released SPECweb96 benchmark test results, a ten-way G5 Turbo server, with ten 500 MHz Turbo G5 processors (each equipped with 4 MB of L2 cache) and a 9393-T82 RAMAC Virtual Array (Iceberg) disk array was able to process 21,591 web hits per second. To get those results, IBM used its forthcoming OS/390 Version 2.7 operating system and its integrated HTTP Server for OS/390 (formerly known as IBM Internet Connection Server and within a year or two to be replaced by Apache for OS/390); OS/390 2.7 will ship in late March and fulfills IBM’s promise to double the web serving performance of the S/390 line. The S/390-YX6 Turbo G5 that IBM tested could handle about 50% more hits than was processed by a Compaq Alpha server with ten 575 MHz Alpha 21264 processors (14,263 hits per second). The S/390 also beat IBM’s RS/6000-S7A Blackbird server, which has twelve 262 MHz Northstar processors with 8 MB of L2 cache each and which was able to process only 12,031 web hits per second. What IBM didn’t mention, of course, is the fact that when Hewlett-Packard Co ships the V2500 Unix servers in March, those machines should be able to process about as many web hits, engine for engine, as the S/390 G5 machines thanks to HP’s PA-RISC 8500 chips, which run at 440 MHz and have 2 MB of L1 (not L2, L1) cache memory. Not only that, but the V2500s can be expanded beyond the 10-way SMP limitation in a single S/390 server up to 32 processors in a single V2500 box. If all of this seems ridiculous, it is. Plenty of organizations have to support tens of thousands of complex online transactions everyday, but very few companies need to handle 2 billion static HTML hits a day. Perhaps more significantly, since price/performance is what sells computers (rather than the excessive scalability that IBM harps on night and day), Siemens has recently announced SPEC96Web results for its Primergy 870 Pentium II Xeon servers (450 MHz chips with 2 MB L2 cache) running Solaris 7 and Sun Web Server 2.1; that machine could handle 10,212 hits per second – that’s half the hits of the S/390 server for a fraction, and very likely a small fraction, of the cost of a S/390.
