IBM Sets New Standard for BI Performance

IBM announced that its NUMA-Q E410 system, unveiled earlier, set new records for both performance and price/performance in the industry standard TPC-H business intelligence performance benchmark. The system, running DB2 Universal Database Enterprise-Extended Edition (EEE), produced leading results at the 300GB scale factor, placing it at the top of the list for business intelligence solutions.

"E-business and business intelligence have placed a premium on the value of data for virtually every market segment," said Mike Kerr, vice president of products, IBM Web Servers. "The performance of the NUMA-Q E410 on the TPC-H benchmark will raise the bar for business intelligence system performance and lower customers' total cost of ownership."

The NUMA-Q E410 also delivered price/performance scores nearly 50 percent better than those published by Hewlett Packard on TPC-H, which was developed in 1999 as a tool to evaluate real-world business intelligence performance.

The E410 is built on IBM's unique third generation NUMA architecture and provides massive scalability required to address growth in concurrent users and raw data. The system is optimized to offer customers flexibility in building infrastructure for large-scale e-business, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and business intelligence applications.

The NUMA-Q system tested featured 64 Intel Pentium III Xeon processors running at 700 MHz and 64GB memory and included IBM's industry leading fibre channel subsystem for maximum I/O efficiency and dynamic partitioning capabilities to enhance system performance and availability.

In TPC-H benchmark testing at the 300 GB scale factor, a 16-quad NUMA-Q system with IBM's DB2 Universal Database Enterprise-Extended Edition Version 7.1 and DYNIX/ptx version 4.5.1 achieved a Composite Queries per-Hour rating of 7,334.4 with a price performance rating of $612 QphH. Benchmark details are below:

The NUMA-Q systems were tested running IBM's multi-user object relational database, DB2 Universal Database Enterprise-Extended Edition. DB2 Universal Database serves as the foundation for industry-leading business intelligence and e-business applications and provides superior scalability and performance. Because of its architecture, DB2 Universal Database EEE is able to fully exploit the linear scalability of NUMA-Q.

"The record setting results of NUMA-Q and DB2 Universal Database on the TPCH benchmark are a strong indication of the superior price/performance and manageability customers can expect when implementing the solution in an enterprise-wide business intelligence environment," said Jim Kelly, vice president of marketing, IBM Data Management Solutions. "The unparalleled scalability and ease of database administration of DB2 Universal Database together with the linear scalability and power displayed by the NUMA-Q platform provide an unbeatable combination."

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, the newest of which is located in Beaverton, Oregon where NUMA-Q systems are developed and manufactured. At the centers, experts from IBM's hardware, software, and business intelligence teams work with Business Partners and customers to bring their business intelligence applications to optimal levels. 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.

About DB2 Universal Database

As the 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

About NUMA-Q Servers

NUMA-Q servers offer industry leading scalable Intel-based server solutions for e-business with industry leading Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architecture and I/O technologies. NUMA-Q servers are optimized for the scalability, availability and manageability requirements of large and rapidly growing e-business infrastructures. There are more than 10,000 NUMA-Q installations worldwide, including some of the world's largest and most sophisticated business intelligence, CRM and ERP environments. For further information about the IBM NUMA-Q brand, phone 800-257-9044 or visit our Web site at www.ibm.com/servers.

The benchmark results were attained in a laboratory environment. Specific customer results from the NUMA-Q E410 may vary based on workload and other factors.

Contact Colleen Haikes TSI Communications, IBM Global Business Intelligence Solutions 212-320-2332 chaikes@tsicomm.com