On the 100GB test, an OpenPower 720 with four 1.65GHz Power5 processors, 32GB of main memory, and 1.6TB of disk capacity could process 6,357.2 queries per hour (QPH) at a cost of $42 per QPH. This machine was running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and DB2 UDB V8.2 for Linux.
Not many vendors are using the TPC-H test these days, but for the sake of comparison, an IBM xSeries 346 with two Xeon DP processors running at 3.6GHz and equipped with 4GB of main memory and 678GB of disk could handle only 1,894 QPH. It did so, however, at a cost of $14 per QPH, which is quite a bargain.
But it would take a cluster of about eight of these machines to match the four-way Open Power 720, in terms of raw performance, and that would yield a bang for the buck of about $18 per QPH.
A Sun Fire V440 server from Sun Microsystems Inc was tested running Sybase Adaptive Server IQ 12.5 and Solaris 10 recently, and this machine, equipped with four 1.6GHz UltraSparc-IIIi processors and 16GB of main memory, was able to take on the 100GB TPC-H workload and deliver 2,883 QPH at a cost of $19 per QPH. IBM is obviously charging a premium for the performance in the OpenPower 720s.
On the 300GB test, a four-way OpenPower 720 with 1.65GHz Power5 processors, 32 GB of main memory, and 2.6TB of disk capacity was able to churn through 12,007 QPH at a cost of $40 per QPH. This server was running IBM’s DB2 for Linux database as well.
IBM’s eight-way xSeries 445, using 3GHz Xeon MP processors and running DB2 on Windows Server 2003, was only able to field 6,552 QPH, and did so at a cost of $66 per QPH. And while Sun’s V440 Sparc/Solaris server was able to match the $40 per QPH that IBM posted on the test using 1.28GHz UltraSparc-IIIi processors, that server did one quarter of the work of the IBM Unix box.
