IBM cracks SAP benchmark record again

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 17 November 2010 11:11

Business IT - Technology

IBM has exceeded the SAP benchmark record it set last month by a huge margin. Getting almost twich as much work done by doubling the number of processing cores is no mean feat.

Last month, IBM set a record for the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution application benchmark. The company has now almost doubled that score.

Running the benchmark on a 256-core Power 795 with AIX 7.1 and DB2 9.7, the test system recorded 126,063 SAP SD benchmark users, 0.98 seconds dialog response time, 13,772,670 line items per hour, 41,318,000 dialog steps per hour, 688,630 SAPS (SAP Application Performance Standard), and 0.011 seconds/0.024 seconds database response time (dialog/update).

IBM officials claimed that is more than three times the number of users handled by a 256-core Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 (said to be Oracle's largest system), and more than four times that of a 128-core Integrity SD64B (said to be HP's largest system).

The result is also more than three times that achieved (2) and the 128-core Oracle result on the two-tier SAP SD-Parallel standard application running on four clustered 32-core Sun Fire X4470 servers with Xeon X7560 CPUs.

"This outstanding result demonstrates once again the innovation and performance leadership of IBM POWER7 technology, Power Systems and DB2," said Jeff Howard, director, IBM Power Systems.

"It nearly doubled the leading result achieved just a month ago on a 128-core system, demonstrating that Power and DB2 can scale to meet the exploding growth in data and data-creating devices," he added.