News
Compaq Demolishes NT Cluster Benchmark
- By Scott Bekker
- January 05, 2000
The latest Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) TPC-C benchmark using a Windows NT cluster by Compaq Computer Corp. has blown away previous results. Using six eight-way Pentium Xeon machines, the Compaq cluster processed 99,274.90 transactions per minute (tpmC), shattering the previous mark of 50,208.43 tpmC for a Windows NT-based cluster.
The new Compaq (www.compaq.com) system, the PDC/O2000, was configured with six Compaq ProLiant 8500 servers, each with Intel Pentium Xeon 550 MHz processors, two megabytes of cache and four gigabytes of RAM. The servers were connected to 90 Compaq RAID Array 4000 disk subsystems through six Gadzoox (www.gadzoox.com) Capellix 3000 Modular SAN switches, each configured with 22 ports. The total disk storage capacity was 9.8 terabytes.
The servers were running the Microsoft Windows NT Enterprise Edition version 4.0 operating system and the Oracle8i Enterprise Edition version 8.1.6 database manager. Other tools included Oracle Parallel Server version 8.1.6 and Mortice Kern Systems' Toolkit for NT.
The previous TPC-C (www.tpc.org) benchmark was held by NEC Corp. (www.nec.com) when it recorded 50,208.43 tpmC, also using Oracle8i. It only used four 8-way machines rather than the six that Compaq used.
In the last few months leading up to the New Year, Compaq, Dell Computer Corp. (www.dell.com), Fujitsu Siemens Computers(www.fujitsu-computers.com), and Unisys Corp. (www.unisys.com) released Windows NT cluster benchmarks on a single 8-way machine, producing results from 40,168.5 to 40, 697.2 tpmC. -- Brian Ploskina
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.