Demonstrating that even the most demanding and complex workloads can be virtualized, IBM has announced that the company has achieved its lowest-ever cost/transaction rate with KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine). The results were achieved with IBM’s x3650M4 platform, a high-performance 2-socket, 2U x86 server; IBM DB2 ESE 9.7; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4; and KVM.
The news is significant because the TPC-C is recognized as a challenging transactional database workload. In order to deploy their most mission-critical workloads in a virtualized environment, customers must have proof points confirming that the workloads will excel.
The new TPC-C result, 1,320,082 transactions per minute, achieved 88% bare metal performance. Not only is IBM the first company to submit a virtualized x86 TPC-C result, but this benchmark with KVM is also the lowest cost/transaction rate that IBM has ever achieved.
Full results are available here.
For more information on the benchmark, go here.
Red Hat has posted a blog on the TPC-C results here.