SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 17, 2000 — Microsoft Corp. today revealed new scalability features in the upcoming release of Microsoft® SQL Server TM 2000 and detailed a technology road map that together will provide customers with virtually unlimited scalability on the Windows® 2000 platform, a key element of friction-free operations. The company also announced an array of world-record database benchmarks, including a TPC-C benchmark result, demonstrating the power of the Microsoft platform in both scale-out and scale-up scenarios. At 227,079 order transactions per minute, the TPC-C result sets the world record for any hardware, operating system or database. The result was achieved with Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000 running on 12 Compaq ProLiant servers in a scale-out configuration.
“With Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000, Microsoft is delivering the first major installment on our vision for software scale-out from the Web tier to the application tier, through to the database tier,”
said Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chief software architect.
“Today’s benchmark results prove the success of our strategy, and these innovations redefine the playing field for enterprise-class application platforms.”
Enterprise-Class Scalability Today
The technology road map begins today with Windows 2000 and SQL Server 7.0 which, with the industry’s most modern operating system and database architectures, allow customers to utilize state-of-the-art hardware and networking technologies while building large-scale enterprise applications. The next step occurs later this year with the release of SQL Server 2000, which will include a new feature allowing scale-out partitioning. Distributed partitioned views, the feature used to produce the world-record TPC-C result, provides e-commerce customers with unlimited scalability by dividing workload across multiple independent SQL Server-based servers. Customers will have the opportunity to begin evaluating scale-out partitioning for themselves when SQL Server 2000 beta 2 becomes available worldwide in April 2000.
“Compaq is committed to delivering the ultimate in scalability and reliability,”
said Michael Capellas, president and chief executive officer, Compaq Computer Corp.
“Today’s benchmarks prove that Compaq servers running Windows 2000 and SQL Server will meet the needs of our largest e-business customers. Most exciting is that these results represent just the first step in a series of significant innovations. With our announcement Tuesday to deliver 16- and 32-processor Intel-based servers before the end of the year and with the advancements in the Microsoft platform, our customers are ensured a future of unlimited scalability.”
“We run our business now on Windows 2000 and SQL Server 7.0, and this platform provides exceptional scalability and reliability, even with the phenomenal growth of our business,”
said Robb Brock, vice president of technology for BUY.COM Inc.
“With Microsoft’s announcement today, we are absolutely confident that the Microsoft platform will help us to meet the demands of a rapidly expanding Internet and e-commerce economy.”
The World-Record Benchmarks
Ushering in this new era of scalability, Microsoft announced a series of benchmarks with Compaq, Unisys Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co.that highlight Microsoft’s leadership – today with SQL Server 7.0 and in the near future with SQL Server 2000. These benchmarks demonstrate scalability for the highest end of enterprise line-of-business and e-commerce solutions. The TPC-C result represents the first time that SQL Server has been used in a scale-out partitioning scenario. The other five results, run with SQL Server on a single system, demonstrate scale-up capabilities.
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World record on all platforms for TPC-C benchmark. SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition running on Windows 2000 Advanced Server and using native Windows 2000 COM+ transaction support as the transaction processing monitor set a new world record for the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s TPC-C benchmark, an industry-standard test measuring transaction-processing-system throughput in terms of orders processed per minute. The new result, 227,079.15 order transactions per minute (tpmC), was achieved on 12 Compaq ProLiant 8500 servers, each with eight Intel Pentium III Xeon 550 MHz processors, federated together into a single database system, and is greater than any result achieved on any other database, hardware or operating system. This result eclipses by 67 percent the previous record of 135,815 tpmC set on a single RISC/UNIX-based system. This result is also a 68 percent improvement over the best clustered result ever achieved, at 135,461 tpmC set on a four-node RISC/UNIX-based system with 96 processors. 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.
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Best SAP R/3 Sales and Distribution (SD) 4.0 B benchmarks on Windows. Microsoft has demonstrated dramatically higher performance for the SAP R/3 SD standard application benchmark, which measures the maximum number of concurrent users supported by a system while guaranteeing user response times of less than two seconds. Two new results announced today have set performance records on the Windows platform and were achieved with SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition and Windows 2000 Advanced Server — one result on Compaq servers at 6,700 SD benchmark users and one on Unisys servers at 6,600 SD benchmark users.
The Compaq result was achieved using a single Compaq ProLiant 8000 database server with eight Intel Pentium III Xeon 550 MHz processors, 701 GB of total disk space, 4 GB of memory and 26 application servers interconnected using Compaq ServerNet technology. The average dialog response time was 1.99 seconds, and the throughput achieved 670,670 fully business-processed line items per hour. Twenty-five application servers were configured with eight Pentium III Xeon 550 MHz processors and with 2 GB of memory, and one application server was configured with four Pentium III Xeon 500 MHz processors. The CPU utilization was 98 percent for the database server and 61 percent for the average of all application servers.
The Unisys result was achieved on a single Unisys e-@ction Optimized Server for SAP with eight Intel Pentium III Xeon 550 MHz processors, 444 GB of total disk space, 4 GB of memory and 28 application servers interconnected through a Giganet cLAN server farm network. The average dialog response time was 1.97 seconds, and the throughput achieved was 661,670 fully business-processed line items per hour. The 28 application servers were configured with eight Pentium III Xeon 550 MHz processors and with 2 GB of memory. The CPU utilization was 97 percent for the database server and 60 percent for the average of all application servers.
These results represent a 37 percent and a 35 percent improvement respectively over the previous record on the Windows platform of 4,900 SD benchmark users held by a competing database running on nearly identical hardware. (Detailed information on these benchmarks is available at http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/pdf/50020428.pdf ). The integration of the ServerNet and cLAN technologies into these configurations demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to supporting state-of-the-art, high-performance cluster interconnect technologies.
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World record on all platforms for PeopleSoft HRMS benchmark. SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition and Windows 2000 Advanced Server set a new world record for the PeopleSoft Human Resources Management System (HRMS) benchmark, which measures the maximum number of concurrent users supported by a system while guaranteeing a user response time of less than three seconds. The benchmark result, 21,000 concurrent HRMS users, was achieved on a Compaq ProLiant 8000 database server with eight Intel Pentium III Xeon 550 MHz processors. This result is the highest ever achieved on any platform and is 22 percent better than the next-best result ever achieved by any competing database.
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World record on all platforms for PeopleSoft Financials benchmark. SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition and Windows 2000 Advanced Server set a new world record for the PeopleSoft Financials benchmark, which measures the maximum number of concurrent users supported by a system while guaranteeing a user response time of less than three seconds. The benchmark result, 4,600 concurrent users, was achieved on a Compaq ProLiant 8000 database server with eight Intel Pentium III Xeon 550 MHz processors. This result is the highest ever achieved on any platform and is 2 percent better than the previous record, achieved on SQL Server 7.0 and Windows NT® Server 4.0, and 15 percent better than the best result achieved on the RISC/UNIX platform.
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World record benchmark for CRM systems on Windows. Pivotal eRelationship 2000, running on SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition and Windows 2000 Advanced Server, set a world record for customer relationship management (CRM) systems running on the Windows platform. The benchmark demonstrated that Pivotal eRelationship 2000 scales to 20,000 concurrent benchmark users with subsecond response times for 95 percent of all users. This result was achieved on a Compaq Proliant 8000 database server with eight Intel Pentium III Xeon 500 MHz processors. Pivotal eRelationship 2000, a Windows DNA-based application designed for e-business relationship management, was benchmarked using actual Pivotal customer transaction workloads.
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World record TPC-H benchmark on Windows platform. SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition running on Windows 2000 Advanced Server set a new world record for performance on the Windows platform for the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s TPC-H benchmark while far surpassing all other price/performance results. The result, 1,291.4 queries per hour on a 100GB database at $222.00 per query, was achieved on a Hewlett-Packard NetServer LXr 8500 with eight Intel Pentium III Xeon 550 MHz processors, with over 1.5 terabytes of storage. The performance of the HP system running SQL Server beats a Sun 12-processor Enterprise 4500 running Informix, delivering the result at one-quarter of the cost of the Sun system.
TPC-H simulates a decision support system with large volumes of data, synchronized with online production databases. It uses highly complex, ad hoc queries designed to answer real-world business questions about such subjects as pricing and promotions, supply and demand, profit and revenue, and market share.
Scalability End Game
Longer term, there are additional significant technology milestones ensuring an accelerating expansion of scalability for customers building and deploying solutions on the Microsoft platform. These innovations include the expected introduction in mid-2000 of Intel Pentium III Xeon-based servers with 16 and 32 processors, offering many times more power than existing eight-processor systems. In addition, following the introduction of Intel’s 64-bit Itanium platform later in 2000, Microsoft plans to release 64-bit versions of Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000. These state-of-the-art systems will allow customers to utilize terabytes of system memory for the most complex applications. Finally, the next version of SQL Server (code-named
“Yukon”
) will continue software scale innovation by introducing the second generation of scale-out partitioning, shared-nothing clustering technology.
“Yukon”
will provide customers with tremendous additional gains in scalability while pushing the state of the art for reliability and manageability.
Windows DNA 2000 and SQL Server
Microsoft Windows DNA is the most comprehensive, integrated platform for building and deploying applications for the business Internet. The core of Windows DNA is Windows 2000, an operating system with built-in Internet services that enable developers to focus on adding value to their applications rather than wasting time on the underlying plumbing. Other components include the Visual Studio® development system, SQL Server, the COM+ component and programming model, and other application services — all best-of-breed products that leverage the deepest developer talent pool in the industry.
Created by a world-class development team, Microsoft SQL Server is the leading database for the Windows platform and is the reliable, scalable database for rapidly building Web solutions with Windows DNA. SQL Server reduces the time required to bring e-commerce, business intelligence (data warehousing) and line-of-business applications to market while ensuring that these applications have the scalability needed for the most demanding environments.
Copies of the beta release are scheduled to be available on the SQL Server Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/ in April 2000.
TPC-C and TPC-H benchmark results are valid as of Feb. 17, 2000. Compaq TPC-C results were achieved with 12 Compaq ProLiant 8500 servers, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and SQL Server 2000 at 227,079.15 tpmC and $19.12 per tpmC. The system is expected to be available Aug. 1, 2000. IBM results were achieved with IBM RISC System 6000 Enterprise Server S80, IBM AIX 4.3.3, Oracle 8i at 135,815 tpmC and $52.70 per tpmC. The system is expected to be available March 1, 2000. Sun TPC-C results were achieved with Sun Enterprise 6500 cluster, Sun Solaris 2.6, Oracle 8i Enterprise Edition at 135,461 tpmC and $97.10 per tpmC. The system became available Jan. 31, 2000. Sun TPC-H results were achieved with Sun Enterprise 4500, Sun Solaris 7, Informix Dynamic Server AD 8.30FC1 at 1,280.10 QphH at 100GB scale and $816.00 per QphH at 100DB scale. This result was withdrawn on Feb. 15, 2000.
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“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
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