Hewlett-Packard has taken the top two spots in the
Transaction Processing Council's benchmarks with the new Oracle 10g
database, making the combination a viable alternative to Fujitsu
and IBM.
The latest TPC benchmarks rated the Oracle 10g, running on an HP
Integrity Superdome, at 1,008,144 transactions per minute at a cost
per transaction of £4.94.
The HP/Oracle system gained the highest performance in the TPC's
results for non-clustered servers, although the system costs were
higher than Microsoft's entry, which came third.
The Microsoft's 64-bit SQL Server running on Integrity hardware
performed 786,646 transactions per minute, which was 28% slower
than HP/Oracle, but the cost per transaction was 28% cheaper at
£3.85.
Although the cost per transaction showed that the HP/Oracle system
costs were in line with the less powerful Microsoft configuration,
analyst firm Gartner said HP database servers were a viable
alternative to Unix-based databases.
Gartner said HP could now show it could challenge Fujitsu, IBM and
Sun Microsystems and that business should exploit the unit price in
negotiations.
Ian Brown, Gartner research director, said, "Although such tests
are not indicative of real-world performance, they do provide a
useful reference for users wanting to know about the price and
performance of systems."
Brown said HP and IBM were neck-and-neck when it came to costs, but
that Fujitsu was set to make a stronger challenge with some new
configurations of its own. Sun Microsystems did not take part in
the test.