Sun joins the benchmarketing season

Sitting with the heavy hitters

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 29th June 2002 08:24 GMT

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Sun Microsystems yesterday announced that its flagship Sun Fire 15K server had recorded the World's Fastest TPC data warehouse result based on the TPC-H benchmark.

In the latest salvo in the benchmarketing wars (which saw results released by IBM and Hewlett-Packard earlier this week), a 72-processor 1050 MHz Sun Fire 15K system with 288GB of memory, running Solaris 9 and an Oracle9i Database, toped the performance of the 128 processor HP and NCR systems. Sun's system featured 18 Sun StorEdge A5200 disk arrays.

The system, designed to serve as a mainframe replacement and due to be available on October 30, delivered 23,813.7 QphH@3000GB at a price performance of $215/QphH@3000GB. This represents a 26 percent better price/performance for the Sun Fire 15K rig over Intel-based systems, according to Sun.

The TPC-H benchmark represents ad-hoc queries designed to represent real-world decision support and data warehousing applications. IBM has yet to run a TPC-H benchmark on its mainframe or IBM p690 server, according to Sun.

You can see a table showing comparative performances in the benchmark here. ®