HP and Oracle have just announced a TPC-C benchmark test result on an Integrity rx4640 server, using four of the new 1.6GHz/9MB cache Madison Itanium 2 chips. In that online transaction processing test, the server was equipped with 128GB of main memory and 19.2TB of disk capacity, and it could crank through 161,217 transactions per minute (TPM).
That server was equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3 and Oracle’s 10g Standard Edition. This machine delivered a price/performance of $3.94 per TPM. That performance is slightly better than for eight-way Xeon MP servers running Windows Server 2003 and delivering about the same bang for the buck at the network-level pricing that the TPC-C test uses. That Linux box did a little less work than a four-way Power5-based p5 570 server using 1.65GHz Power5 cores. That AIX-based machine delivered 194,391 TPM, but did so at a cost of $5.62 per TPM – even after hefty discounts.
On the TPC-H data warehousing benchmark test, a 12-node cluster comprised of four-way ProLiant DL585 servers with 2.2GHz Opteron 848 processors was able to handle 35,141 queries per hour (QPH) on the 1,000 GB version of the test. Those servers, which were also running Red Hat AS 3 and Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition (which includes the clustered database software), were clustered together with InfiniBand switches and host software from InfiniCon Systems.
The cluster costs $60 per QPH, which was about the same bang for the buck as UltraSparc and Itanium servers that delivered a lot less performance (but could have scaled, too, if they had been extended with clusters). The performance of this Linux cluster was a little bit better than a monolithic Fujitsu-Siemens PrimePower 2500 Unix server, which cost 2.5 times as much. An HP Superdome using 64 of Intel’s 1.5GHz Itaniums could deliver 45,248 QPH on the TPC-H test, but it cost $109 per QPH, too.
