IBM Breaks Double Digit Performance Barrier With 10 Million Transactions Per Minute

The combination of IBM Power Systems with IBM DB2 database software and IBM Storage Tops the Competition in Performance, Energy and Cost

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Aug 17, 2010, 11:55 ET

ARMONK, N.Y., Aug. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today an IBM POWER7-based system with IBM DB2 database software and IBM System Storage broke all previous records and topped the 10 million transactions per minute mark using the industry standard TPC performance benchmark, easily besting all results previously achieved by competitors such as HP and Oracle.

IBM achieved the industry's highest ever TPC-C (transaction processing) benchmark result using a Power Systems configuration with DB2, hitting 10,366,254 tpmC,(1). The IBM result delivered the follow breakthrough results including:

Performance more than 2.5 times better than HP's best result(2), 69% greater performance per core, and 2.1 times better price/performance
Performance more than 35% better than Oracle's best performance result(3), 2.7 times better performance per core, and 41% better price performance.

In addition, IBM calculations on the IBM configuration show it requires 35% less energy per transaction compared to the energy usage data published by Oracle on the Oracle configuration(1).

Organizations across all industries are demanding systems that address the data intensive workload demands of today's applications and services with better performance and lower cost. Per-core performance is important for clients in industries such as energy, mobile communications and financial services, who run database application workloads that use per-core pricing when determining total solution cost. Fewer cores for the same performance can translate to significant and direct savings in licensing and ongoing annual software maintenance costs.

"Smarter healthcare providers, cities, retailers, smarter energy grids and financial systems, all require support for ever greater data volumes and transaction throughput," said Arvind Krishna, General Manager, IBM Information Management. "The results of this benchmark demonstrate how IBM innovations combine to deliver unprecedented performance and cost efficiency for data intensive applications. Not only can you scale to massive data volumes and transaction throughput, but you can do so economically in an energy efficient way."

This TPC-C benchmark with DB2 9.7 was done with a cluster of three IBM Power 780 servers, each with 8 processors, 64 cores, and 256 threads achieving a throughput of 10,366,254 tpmC at $1.38/tpmC with availability date of October 13, 2010. Full details of this and other above mentioned TPC results are available at www.tpc.org.

IBM Power Systems claim leadership in more than 100 key computing performance benchmarks. For more details, please visit http://www.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/benchmarks.

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(1) IBM Power7 Benchmark Result: IBM Power 780: 10,366,254 tpmC at $1.38USD/tpmC available October 13, 2010, running on 3 nodes with a total of 24 processors, 192 cores and 768 threads. TPC-C results available at www.tpc.org. Energy requirements generated using IBM energy estimate based on IBM calculations using customer-available energy estimation tools for IBM servers, storage energy estimation reports available from IBM Techline services, and published component active power consumption specifications. Energy estimates are not related to, and should not be compared to, official TPC-Energy results.

(2) HP Benchmark Result: HP Integrity Superdome: 4,092,799 tpmC at $2.93 USD/tpmC, available August 6, 2007, running on 1 node with a total of 64 processors, 128 cores and 256 threads.

(3) Oracle Sun Benchmark Result: Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440: 7,646,486 tpmC at $2.36USD/tpmC, available March 19, 2010, running on 12 nodes with a total of 48 processors, 384 cores and 3,072 threads. Energy requirements taken from an Oracle-commissioned report located at http://www.oracle.com/features/strategic-focus-report.pdf. Energy estimates are not related to, and should not be compared to, official TPC-Energy results.

Results current as of August 17, 2010. TPC, TPC Benchmark, TPC-C and tpmC are trademarks of the Transaction Processing Performance Council.