News

Unisys Runs Itanium 2 on Industry Standard Benchmark

• By Scott Bekker
• October 17, 2002

The test was on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-H benchmark, which is a measure of the performance of systems for business intelligence applications.

Unisys ran the test on one of its new ES7000 Orion 130 models with 64 GB of RAM running Windows .NET Server 2003 Datacenter Server and 64-bit SQL Server 2000.

Unisys produced a middle-of-the-pack performance result in the 300 GB database size category. Its 4,774 QphH result was well behind the best non-clustered result, 7,334 QphH from a two-year-old, 64-processor IBM NUMA system. It was even further behind the best clustered result -- a 12,995 QphH result posted in April by Compaq-HP on ProLiant servers running Pentium III Xeons, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and IBM DB2. Clustered results are highly controversial in TPC circles.

Unisys argues the result shines because of its price-performance superiority to NUMA and Unix and simplicity advantages over clustering configurations.

"The low cost per query achieved in the benchmark speaks to the cost-of-ownership advantages of scale-up, Microsoft- and Intel-based computing, which reduces the administrative and operational complexities associated with clustered server configurations," Don Montgomery, Unisys director of business intelligence programs, said in a statement.

The Unisys system came in at $218/QphH, compared with $616/QphH for the IBM system. The ProLiant cluster cost $199/QphH.

Total system cost for the Unisys configuration was a little over $1 million. The company provided a system availability date of March 31, 2003.