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Unisys Tests 64-bit Windows System on SAP Benchmark

Unisys used 64-bit Itanium 2 processors and a 16-processor server to push the performance envelope of Windows-based systems on SAP's Sales and Distribution benchmark by 250 percent, the company announced this week. When compared against larger Unix/RISC systems, however, the result ranks 10th overall and is 17 percent as scalable as the best result.

The benchmark involved is the two-tier SAP SD benchmark, which is controlled by the ERP giant SAP. It is widely used as a proving ground for different hardware and software vendors. A major limitation is that unlike the Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmarks, the SAP benchmark doesn't show system costs.

Unisys did a lot of tests of its 32-processor ES7000 on SAP's three-tier SD benchmark, but the new Itanium 2 result is the large server's first run against the two-tier version of the benchmark. The two-tier benchmark is designed to approximate the environment of a centralized Internet-based system.

The test configuration involved a Unisys ES7000 Aries 130 configured with 16 Intel Itanium 2 processors (1-GHz with 3 MB of L3 cache) and 64 GB of RAM. Microsoft 64-bit software included Windows .NET Server 2003, Datacenter Edition, and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition.

Unisys achieved 1340 concurrent SAP standard application SD users. The company noted that the result was the best non-clustered showing for a Unix or Windows server with fewer than 24 processors.

The top result on this particular benchmark was published by Fujitsu Siemens in January. A 128-processor system running Solaris 8 and Oracle9i supported 7,800 users. The best Windows result, prior to the Unisys run, involved an 8-way IBM eServer xSeries 440, that hit 520 SAP users in March. IBM ran the benchmark with 1.6-GHz Xeon processors, Windows 2000 and DB2 Universal Database version 7.2.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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