News

HP Tops TPC-C Benchmark with HP-UX, Oracle

• By Scott Bekker
• July 31, 2003

Hewlett-Packard claimed the top spot in the high-profile TPC-C scalability benchmark this week with a system running its HP-UX 11 operating system and an Oracle database. The feat was accomplished on the same HP Superdome server with 64 Itanium processors that Microsoft used with Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 to claim the top spot on the TPC-C in May.

Since then, IBM displaced HP's server and Microsoft's software in June with a 32-processor IBM eServer pSeries server running IBM's own Power 4 processors, AIX Unix and DB2 database.

HP and Oracle posted a benchmark score of 824,164 transactions per minute on the TPC-C (tpmC) at a cost of $8.28/tpmC. That's a raw performance improvement of 8 percent, with a cost savings of three cents per tpmC over IBM's results of 763,898 tpmC at $8.31/tpmC.

The HP/Oracle results represents a rare comparison of server software performance on similar server hardware. Using the same 64-processor HP Superdome server and Itanium 64-bit processors, HP improved on Microsoft's April result of 707,102 tpmC by 17 percent. The Microsoft result still has the edge on price performance, with a cost per tpmC of $7.16.

When running the test for its own operating system, HP splurged on a $2 million storage system and used more expensive PA-RISC servers as clients in its own test. HP also gave the Oracle/HP-UX system a bigger discount for the test -- 49 percent compared with 45 percent for the Microsoft-based system.

The new benchmark also marks the return of Oracle to the top tier of TPC-C results, and the resumption of the three-way battle for scalability bragging rights among Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.