HP Superdome server outstrips competitors

PALO ALTO, California – Hewlett-Packard Co. recently announced that its HP Superdome server has achieved TPC-C benchmark results that far surpass competitors Sun and IBM, a leap in presence on the Top 500 Supercomputer Site list and a long list of new customer wins.

The high-end Unix HP Superdome server’s exceptional customer acceptance and demonstrably superior capabilities in enterprise and high-performance computing come on top of a price reduction also announced recently.

The new TPC-C benchmark of 389,434 transactions per minute (tpmC) was achieved on a 64-way PA-8700 Superdome running Oracle9i Database, with an outstanding price/performance of $21.24 per transaction.

This is the best result among the top three Unix vendors in the marketplace and showcases Superdome’s superior system scalability with large 64-way systems.

This result also represents the fastest Oracle-based TPC-C result in the industry and bears a testament to the superior performance and scalability of Oracle9i Database.

This result is 76 percent faster and provides a 37 percent better price/performance ratio than IBM’s highest published Unix system TPC-C benchmark.

Sun is not currently present in high-end TPC-C benchmarks. It also represents a 98 percent performance improvement over Superdome’s original result of 197,024 tpmC in early 2001 and gives a 50 percent improvement in the price/performance ratio in the server’s first year on the market.

The 98 percent improvement almost doubles the commitment to performance increase that HP made to its customers during the launch of Superdome in 2000.

"We are giving our customers a winning combination of scalable performance, with lower total cost of operation and room for expansion," said Mark Hudson, worldwide marketing manager of HP Business Systems and Technology Organization.

"HP’s single system approach with Superdome delivers a far simpler and more cost-effective solution than anything our competitors are providing. With future generations and increased numbers of processors, we plan to deliver huge performance boosts like this over the life of the Superdome," Hudson added.