Power tops Intel for SAP apps: IBM

By Stephen Withers
Thursday, 02 July 2009 03:42

Market

IBM claims its POWER6 hardware can outperform Intel-based servers when running SAP applications. And Power systems are cheaper over three years.

Analysts started describing 'commodity' servers as the way ahead several years ago, but IBM has persisted with its own architectures.

The company now claims to have achieved an "industry leading" benchmark result for eight processor cores on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark.

SAP SD was running on a Power 550 server with AIX 6.1 and the DB/2 V 9.5 database. The system could handle 3752 users, more than any other vendor's server that was based on Intel processors.

The Power 550 also returned a higher users-per-core figure than any Intel-based server.

"The benchmark results demonstrated that IBM's POWER6, the world's fastest chip, remains the microprocessor standard, besting all competition -- including Nehalem, Intel's latest chip," IBM officials bragged.

So there's the performance - what about the cost?

According to a study performed by International Technology Group (ITG) and funded by IBM, the three-year costs for Power servers are between one quarter and one third less that those for Intel servers. The study looked at medium to large SAP systems.

Which characteristics make Power cheaper than Intel? Find out on page 2.