Unisys announced that its newest enterprise server, the ES6000 Model 7600R, has set a new record for price/performance in the Transaction Processing Performance Council's (TPC) TPC-H benchmark test. The performance of the Unisys server, which uses the latest Intel Xeon 6-core processors, shows the increasing superiority of Xeon-based systems for mission-critical applications such as business intelligence over those based on Intel Itanium processors, according to Unisys.
The benchmark is significant for a number of reasons, Colin Lacey, vice president, Systems and Storage, Unisys Systems and Technology, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Obviously we accomplished a record-breaking benchmark which is always notable, in and of itself. The second piece is that this is the first time that a Xeon architecture has driven these levels of performance. This is a class of performance that has typically been restricted only to RISC, SPARC or Itanium processor categories."
The TPC-H benchmark is widely recognized as a standard measure of system performance for decision support and business intelligence in a commercial data-center environment. It shows performance by decision support systems that examine large volumes of data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and provide answers to critical business questions.
"What we are really looking at, especially in this current economic climate, is that we could deliver significantly better performance, and even more so-price/performance and total cost of ownership in driving this specific type of workload," Lacey notes. "And the workload we are talking about here is decision support and business intelligence. That is a class of workload that has historically been driven more on those higher end systems in the Itanium or RISC class," Lacey adds.
The ES6000 Model 7600R delivered stellar results, achieving performance of 80,172.7 QphH@10,000GB and price/performance of $18.95 per QphH@10,000GB. Performance in the TPC-H benchmark test is measured as composite queries per hour against a database of 10,000 gigabytes (QphH@10,000GB), while economic efficiency is shown as price/performance expressed in dollars per QphH@10,000GB.
"Now more than ever it is critical for clients to explore alternative architectures to lower their IT costs and gain a new range of options for virtualization, application and database deployment as they transform their data centers to support a real-time infrastructure that responds dynamically to changes in the business environment," according to Lacey.
The results also move the ES6000 Model 7600R, which was tested running Microsoft SQL Server 2008, into leadership in multiple categories in the TPC-H benchmark, including best price/performance at 10,000GB by any system, either non-clustered or clustered; best and only performance at 10,000GB yet recorded for a server based on the Intel Xeon processor; best performance at 10,000GB by a server using a Microsoft SQL Server database; and best performance at 10,000GB by a server using the Intel and Microsoft Windows environment.
For a full view of the benchmark results, go here. For more information on the ES6000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server, go here.
The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is a non-profit corporation founded to define transaction processing and database benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable TPC performance data to the industry. Benchmark results and further information can be accessed via the TPC home page.