IBM TOPS RECORD FOR BI PERFORMANCE

IBM announced that its next generation RS/6000 SP system with DB2 Universal Database Version 7.1 has set a new record for business intelligence performance in the TPC-H benchmark, easily besting the previous record at onethird the price/performance.

The achievement reasserts the SP with DB2 Universal Database as the leading computing platform for large-scale business intelligence applications.

The TPC-H benchmark was designed as a tool to evaluate real-world business intelligence performance. Because it places a focus on a system's ability to efficiently execute complex ad hoc queries, the benchmark becomes more difficult to run as the size of the database grows. IBM elected to run the benchmark test at one terabyte, the level most indicative of the massive amounts of data used in today's enterprise business intelligence applications. The RS/6000 SP, fueled by innovative IBM copper microprocessor technology, rose to the challenge, demonstrating unprecedented power, scalability and a price/performance ratio three times better than Compaq, the previous record holder.

"The RS/6000 SP has moved to the head of the class as a platform for business intelligence and e-business," said Shaku Atre, president of the Atre Group, a New York-based industry consulting firm. "The achievement at one terabyte on the new TPC-H benchmark is a clear indication of IBM's ability to deliver exceptional performance and scalability for business intelligence applications under the most demanding of circumstances."

In TPC-H benchmark testing at 1 terabyte, a 32-node RS/6000 SP system with IBM's DB2 Universal Database Version 7.1 and AIX Version 4.3.3, achieved a Composite Queries per-Hour rating of 12,891.4 QphH with a price performance of $668. Benchmark details are highlighted below:

"The IBM RS/6000 SP is designed to host the world's most demanding workloads and that is why it excels at large-scale business intelligence tasks," said Rod Adkins, general manager, IBM RS/6000."The new copper-enhanced SP system with DB2 and AIX provides not only industry-leading performance, but also superior affordability, scalability and availability to meet customer's requirements for unparalleled business intelligence processing power."

"This record-setting performance demonstrates how DB2 Universal Database is optimized to fully exploit the RS/6000 and help companies obtain timely answers to complex questions," said Janet Perna, general manager, IBM Data Management Solutions."The best e-businesses leverage every bit of information they have, which requires the analysis of large amounts of information very rapidly. Companies around the world have chosen DB2 Universal Database with the RS/6000 SP as the cornerstone of their business intelligence solutions, reflecting IBM's committment to scale solutions in support of their growing business needs."

With more than 8,500 SP systems installed, IBM continues to enhance its Deep Computing technology. The RS/6000 SP in this benchmark used 4-way, 64-bit SMP nodes with the recently introduced copper-based Power3-II microprocessor running at 375 MHz and a Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) disk subsystem. Available in configurations up to 512 nodes, IBM deployed only 32 nodes to easily double the TPC-H performance previously recorded by Compaq.

IBM Tops In High Performance Computing

IBM is the leader in high performance computing according to the TOP500 list of Supercomputers, a semi-annual report that tracks the use of supercomputers by universities, government labs and a wide array of businesses. IBM leads all vendors with 141 systems -- all RS/6000 SPs -- up 36 percent from one year ago.

Business Intelligence Expertise

Business intelligence -- including data warehousing, data mining and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) tools -- allows companies to gain additional insights from their data. One of the fastest growing segments of the enterprise IT sector, it is growing more than 43 percent a year and is expected to reach $148 billion by 2003, according to the BI/DW Research Program at Survey.com www.survey.com.

In order to ensure exceptional performance for customer's business intelligence systems, IBM maintains five Teraplex Integration Centers. At the centers, experts from IBM's hardware, software, and business intelligence teams join forces with Business Partners and customers to bring their business intelligence applications to levels far above what is required in real-life. By conducting these stress tests on hardware and software in a controlled environment, scalability and functionality issues can be identified before business intelligence systems go into operation at a customer site. For more information on IBM business intelligence solutions, please see: www.ibm.com/bi. For more information on IBM RS/6000, visit www.rs6000.ibm.com. For more information on IBM Data Management, visit www.software.ibm.com/data.

TPC-related data presented here is current as of April 28, 2000. The Compaq result listed here has an availability date of November 1, 1999. The new IBM result shown here has an availability date of August 15, 2000.

About RS/6000

More than 1,000,000 IBM RS/6000 systems have been shipped to over 150,000 commercial and technical customers around the world. The RS/6000 family of computers feature IBM RISC-based microprocessors and run AIX, IBM's UNIX operating system. RS/6000 products range in size and capacity from workstations, workgroup and enterprise servers, to the RS/6000 SP supercomputer. From businesses deploying advanced technologies to become more efficient and profitable, to governments and universities seeking to solve the grand challenge problems of our time, RS/6000 computers support a wide range of applications and provide the reliability, availability and price/performance that today's information technology managers demand. For more information about RS/6000 systems and the AIX operating system, see the RS/6000 home page at www.rs6000.ibm.com.

About DB2

As a foundation for e-business, DB2 Universal Database is the industry's first multimedia, Web-ready relational database management system, strong enough to meet the demands of large corporations and flexible enough to serve medium-sized and small e-businesses. DB2 Universal Database combines integrated power for business intelligence, content management, enterprise information portals and e-business with industry-leading performance and reliability to drive the most demanding industry solutions. DB2 Universal Database together with Internet technology makes information easily accessible, available and secure. There are more than 40 million DB2 users from over 300,000 companies worldwide relying on IBM data management solutions. For more information please visit www.software.ibm.com/data.