Last week IBM announced it had pipped Hewlett-Packard to
the top spot on the TPC benchmarks for non-clustered
servers.
In essence, the results show that, where price is no object, IBM
would be able to configure a datacentre server based on its pSeries
690 which could beat last month's leader, the HP Superdome.
HP and its erstwhile partners Intel and Microsoft have a policy to
beat expensive propriety Unix systems both in terms of performance
and overall cost per transaction. So while IBM attained a TPC
benchmark of 680,613.12 tpmC, the cost per transaction was
$11.13/tpmC.
When I spoke to him last week, Richard George, HP's business
manager responsible for the company's business server line, was
keen to point out the fact that while IBM did indeed outperform HP
by about 3%, the IBM configuration was more than $1m more
expensive. Moreover, Rogers emphasised that IBM's system was
proprietary (ie it used Unix and IBM's Power 4 processor) and that
the system in question was at the end of its life, giving what he
suggested was absolutely no upgrade path for users.
Not to be outdone, IBM referred me to the HP Superdome
specification submitted to the TPC. It transpires that the HP
machine is configured with 64 processors, while IBM's "only" uses
32. This has an impact on software costs.
So while IBM is more expensive, the cost of licensing DB/2 and AIX
software for its 32-way system is at least $500,000 (£310,000) less
than 64-bit SQL Server and Windows 2003 on the HP Superdome.
George conceded that the "street price" of DB/2 is more attractive
than SQL Server, but he put this price difference down to the
ongoing price war between IBM and Oracle over database
licensing.
I asked Simon Roberts, pSeries product manager at IBM, why the IBM
system was significantly more expensive than HP's offering, for
what appears a rather insignificant 3% improvement on performance.
It is all down to the storage, he said.
IBM used "proper" enterprise storage based on its SSA disc
subsystem, while HP used cheap and cheerful SCSI discs. Roberts
said no datacentre manager would base their datacentre storage on
SCSI - most opt for expensive kit such as Fibre Channel and storage
area networks.
At HP, George admitted the benchmark was based on its cheaper MSA
range rather than the datacentre-class EVA family of storage
products. He could not give me a reason why this was so.
So what does this prove? Is HP trying to pull the wool over our
eyes? Is IBM having a $1m laugh? It certainly seems so, on both
counts.
Neither server tested is currently shipping. The HP Superdome is
configured with Intel's next-generation Itanium chip, Madison, and
is not due to hit the market until October. IBM's machine will ship
on 31 May but the software patches users will need to apply to
achieve its record-breaking TPC results will not be available until
October.
What is the TPC?
The Transaction Processing Performance Council is a body devoted to
benchmarking transaction processing systems. To derive the number
of transactions that can be processed in a given timeframe, TPC
benchmarks measure the total performance of the system, including
the operating system, database management system and any other
related components. The TPC-C benchmark yields transactions per
minutes expressed in tpmC ratings.
www.tpc.org
