REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 21, 2000 — By last August, when Compaq unveiled its eight-way ProLiant 8800 and 8500 systems for the burgeoning e-business market, the company had already achieved remarkable performance results from a single machine running SQL Server — proving that customers could rely on this low-cost solution for high-performance e-business applications.
With the explosive growth in e-business, Compaq knew that customers would demand increasing performance and scalability from their systems. But Compaq realized that its ProLiant servers — combined with the high performance, clustering and scalability of SQL Server and Windows 2000 — could achieve even greater results. So Compaq engineers teamed up with Microsoft’s SQL Server and Windows 2000 development groups to see how far they could take this performance in scale-up and scale-out scenarios.
This proved to be a winning combination. On the eve of the Windows 2000 launch, after dozens of sleepless nights, Microsoft and Compaq engineers shattered world records for performance on the industry-standard TPC-C benchmark, using a cluster of 12 ProLiant servers in a scale-out configuration, running SQL Server 2000 and Windows 2000. The system processed an astonishing 227,079 order transactions per minute, the best results for any hardware, operating system or database. ( Click here to read Compaq’s press release. )
“The combination of Compaq ProLiant servers with Microsoft SQL Server and Windows 2000 is a clear winner for e-business customers,” said Jim Allchin, group vice president of the Windows Division at Microsoft. “These results further prove that Compaq hardware and the Microsoft platform provide customers with a clear roadmap for almost unlimited Internet scalability.”
The Transaction Processing Performance Council’s TPC-C benchmark measures transaction-processing-system throughput in terms of orders processed per minute, providing an objective way for customers to evaluate database performance. By this benchmark, a cluster of 12 Compaq ProLiant 8500 servers, each with eight Intel Pentium III Xeon processors, processed 227,079.15 order transactions per minute (tpmC), eclipsing by 67 percent the previous record of 135,815 tpmC set on a single RISC/UNIX-based system. The results are also a 68 percent improvement over the previous best cluster results (from a 96-processor, four-node RISC/Unix-based system.) The tpmC performance achieved by Microsoft and Compaq clearly demonstrates the power these systems can offer to e-business customers — the rate of 227,079.15 transactions per minute represents a volume 575 times larger than the combined transaction volumes of Amazon.com and eBay.
“Compaq is in a unique position to build and deliver this kind of solution,” said Microsoft OEM division vice president Richard Fade. “Their industry-leading eight-way server technology provides a cost-effective way for ISPs, ASPs and dot-coms to deliver the kind of performance and reliability they require — combined with Windows 2000 and SQL Server, it’s a winning solution for e-business customers.”
