Sun's New Sun Fire Server Posts New World Record

Sun Microsystems Inc announced a new world record for the PeopleSoft 8 Financials Online benchmark, with Suns new Sun Fire 6800 midframe server delivering 2.4 times more system throughput than Suns nearest competitor. The benchmark supported 12,000 concurrent users, with an average response time of 3.99 seconds. PeopleSoft 8 Financials Online results demonstrate performance on high volume, real-world online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, and shows record performance and flexibility of running PeopleSoft 8 Internet-based computing solutions.

Sun's new Sun Fire server delivers mainframe-quality features and functionality, and unprecedented levels of system availability, real world application performance, flexibility and investment protection throughout the new server line. PeopleSoft 8 Financials delivers extensive, collaborative functionality to help drive cost out of operations, increase the quality of information, speed decision making, and provide the foundation for eBusiness.

"Once again Sun has demonstrated a world record for performance, and with our new Sun Fire server, commercial customers can run complex workloads for their corporate Internet build-out," said Shahin Khan, vice president of Product Marketing and Planning, Sun Microsystems Inc. "PeopleSoft 8 Financials on the Sun Fire server is now the fastest in the industry on a mid-range system, and brings PeopleSoft 8 Financials to a new level of performance. Our new Sun Fire server delivers mainframe-class features to mid-range systems, and these benchmark results are further proof of that."

"This result represents unprecedented performance and scalability for the PeopleSoft Financials Online applications, and demonstrates the continued industry-leading combination of PeopleSoft applications on Sun servers," said Rick Berquist, chief technology officer, PeopleSoft Corporation. "The high-speed scalable interconnect is the accelerator behind the excellent transaction based application performance which is critical for customers seeking solutions with a low total cost of ownership, and the highest levels of availability."

Sun and PeopleSoft Real World Application Performance Tops Competition

PeopleSoft 8 Financials Online represents real world application performance running more complex transactions as well as transaction measurements. For example, during this benchmark, tens of thousands of transactions represented many real workloads that might be found in a customer data center environment. In contrast, a TPC-C benchmark runs less than ten transaction types. The Sun Fire 6800 server is a high performance midframe system that can handle a wide range of workloads.

This benchmark demonstrates performance through support of higher complexity in transactions, schema and operations. The PeopleSoft schema contains 12,362 tables, while TPC-C has only nine. There are 17 different transactions in four separate functions in PeopleSoft 8 Financials Online including Asset Management (AM), Payables (AP), Receivables (AR) and General Ledger (GL); by comparison, TPC-C has five.

Compared to systems from competitors, the Sun Fire 6800 servers results showed only a 50 percent system utilization, while others required 92 to 75 percent utilization. Suns highly efficient UltraSPARC III design running the Solaris 8 Operating Environment (OE) provide a solid foundation for delivering high performance on memory, network and I/O performance.

Investment Protection

By using the Sun Fire 6800 as the database server and the Sun Enterprise 6500 server for the application tier, Sun shows the importance of compatibility across its previous generation of servers. Sun customers can protect their investment in hardware by re-deploying previous generation servers for a variety of applications as their business needs change. In addition, Sun Fire midframe systems share a common system architecture and have interchangeable components, as do the successful Sun Enterprise servers. This common component approach allows customers to redistribute capacity across different servers for flexible and efficient utilization of resources and unparalleled investment protection.

Benchmark Configuration

This benchmark test was conducted at Suns Enterprise Test Center in Palo Alto, Calif., supporting 12,000 concurrent users on a Sun Fire 6800 server, running the Solaris 8 Operating Environment and Oracle 8.1.6 database. The system was loaded with 24 UltraSPARC III 750 MHz CPUs, with an average response time of 3.99 seconds.

PeopleSoft 8 Financials Online is a performance benchmark established by PeopleSoft to demonstrate system performance for a range of processing volumes in specific configurations.

About Sun Microsystems Inc

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems Inc, to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to take their businesses to the nth. With $19.2 billion in annual revenues, Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at sun.com.

Contact Terri Molini, of Sun Microsystems Inc, 408-517-5662 or terri.molini@sun.com.