News
Compaq Achieves Record Low in Price-Performance Benchmark
- By Scott Bekker
- October 03, 2001
Compaq Computer Corp. said Wednesday it had published a
Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmark with a price below the $5-per-transaction threshold.
The TPC-C benchmark for OLTP applications is one of the most closely watched industry-standard benchmarks for measuring system capacity and cost.
For most of this year, Compaq, Dell Computer Corp. and IBM Corp. have been jockeying for position as the vendor that offers each transaction at the lowest cost.
The platform of choice for all three vendors in attempting to set a low-cost-per-transaction record is standard Windows 2000 Server running SQL Server 2000 with COM+ as a transaction monitor.
Last year, the number to beat was $10 per transaction. However, a new TPC specification has seen all vendors price-performance improve, and several vendors have been competing in the sub-$8/transaction race.
IBM published a result on Monday at $5.39.
Compaq used one processor in its system, which processed 9,347 transactions in a minute at a cost of $4.83 each. IBM used three processors to post 20,442 transactions for $5.39 each.
Unlike Compaq's uniprocessor system, all the other systems currently in the TPC-C Price Performance Top 10 have between three and eight processors in the database server.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.