HP Unix Behemoth Squeaks By IBM Big Iron on TPC Test 6th March 2007 By Timothy Prickett Morgan It has taken much forging of iron and tweaking of operating systems and database software, but Hewlett-Packard Co has finally surpassed IBM Corp in taking over the top spot on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test. This is a day that HP and its chip partner, Intel, have been working toward for many years. And, thanks to the delays in the delivery of the dual-core Montecito Itanium 9000 processors and the HP-UX 11i v3 operating system, the Superdome server may not hold that top spot for very long.
Not unless IBM's Power6-based servers, which are due some time this year, are substantially delayed, anyway.
The TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test has been used for more than a decade to gauge the throughput of database and application servers that support relatively simple transaction processing workloads. While the TPC-C test will soon be replaced by the TPC-E OLTP test, which is designed to address some of the shortcomings of the TPC-C workload and the benchmark methodology that is enforced among the vendors who use it for competitive purposes is nonetheless one of the few independent metrics for assessing the performance of a server and getting some sense of what it might cost to build a system that supports a given workload.
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