Sequent, Informix & CLARiiON Post TPC-D Benchmark
Demonstrating clear price/performance leadership for UNIX decision support environments, Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. together with Informix and CLARiiON delivered record-breaking TPC-D (Transaction Processing Performance Council-Decision Support) benchmark price/performance results for UNIX on a single-node system.
Sequent additionally posted impressive results for performance per processor and I/O (input/output) performance. Sequent ran the benchmarks at the 300 GB scale on its second-generation NUMA-Q 2000 servers, announced separately today, with 32 Pentium II Xeon processors running Informix Dynamic Server database software and CLARiiON FC5000 Series Fibre Channel storage systems.
In the TPC-D price/performance metric, NUMA-Q 2000 posted a record breaking $740 per QphD for a single-node UNIX system in the 300 GB category. Comparatively, Sun Microsystems Enterprise 10000 or Starfire server came in at $1,400 per QphD - nearly twice the cost. Sequent came within five percent of Starfire's performance with half the number of processors. Sun's benchmark system used 64 SPARC RISC processors.
"These results demonstrate Sequent's leadership in price/performance for decision support solutions, and validate the substantial performance and throughput gains of our second-generation NUMA-Q systems," said Jeff Pancottine, vice president of global marketing for Sequent. "Our partnership with Informix and CLARiiON provided the industry's most cost-effective data warehousing environment for UNIX on a single system for high scalability and performance."
"Informix Dynamic Server continues to prove its price/performance leadership with the excellent results in this benchmark with Sequent and CLARiiON," said Steve Weick, vice president of research and development at Informix. "The Informix and Sequent relationship assures our joint customers of world-class high end data warehousing solutions that deliver the scalability, speed and cost effectiveness required to win in today's market."
"Sequent's next generation NUMA-Q 2000 systems take full advantage of the CLARiiON FC5000's Fibre Channel capability for high performance, high availability, and configuration flexibility," said Joel Reich, director, Fibre Channel marketing for CLARiiON. "The FC5000 system, as demonstrated by this benchmark, sets a new standard for price/performance, and is ideal for customers with applications requiring very high throughput."
Result Overview
The benchmark was run on a Sequent second-generation NUMA-Q 2000 server, announced today. The benchmark system featured 32 Intel Pentium II Xeon processors, 32 GB memory and 32 fibre channel host adapters. The benchmark system ran Informix Dynamic Server with both the Advanced Decision Support Option and Extended Parallel Option and included 32 CLARiiON storage systems for a total of 256 disks, all Fibre Channel direct attachments. The benchmarks were run at the 300 GB scale factor.
The TPC-D benchmark, which simulates a complex DSS workload with 17 queries and two update streams, is measured by three main metrics: performance (QppD), throughput (QthD) and price/performance ($/QphD). Additionally, Sequent announced record-breaking I/O numbers based on database load time and update time.
Product Overview
Sequent's second-generation NUMA-Q 2000 servers are scalable to 64 Pentium II Xeon processors and feature an industry leading fibre channel subsystem and dynamic partitioning capabilities. Sequent's NUMA-Q architecture offers customers unequaled flexibility in building infrastructure for large-scale e-commerce, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and decision support applications. NUMA-Q provides massive scalability required to address growth in concurrent users and raw data.
Sequent is helping customers leverage this architectural flexibility to embrace new data center standards like Microsoft Windows NT and Intel's up-coming IA-64, while utilizing proven technologies where they are required to ensure service levels. NUMA-Q is the engine underlying Sequent's UNIX and Windows NT mixed-mode NUMACenter environment.
Informix Dynamic Server is a completely integrated, fully optimized, parallel-everywhere database server designed to help transform a company's information resources into a powerful force for business innovation. With its combination of breakthrough performance and unmatched scalability with infinite, user-defined extensibility, Informix Dynamic Server is an enterprise-class, easily customizable database architecture that meets the needs of companies seeking a single database engine that features reliability, high performance, scalability, and the ability to manage all kinds of data.
From multimedia audio and video data, to spatial data, to traditional alphanumeric data, Informix Dynamic Server has the sophistication and power to manage every kind of information generated and utilized by today's successful businesses.
The CLARiiON FC5000 Fibre Channel JBOD is a powerful, flexible, highly scalable storage solution for today's enterprise applications. Featuring modular building blocks and parallel deployment, plus advanced Fibre Channel technology, users gain a flexible storage solution that meets immediate needs and is easily adaptable to unpredictable future requirements. This high availability disk subsystem is designed to be completely redundant, hot-pluggable, and hot-repairable. The subsystem is easily upgradeable to RAID providing investment protection, and supports up to ten dual-ported disk drives in a compact 3.5 U enclosure, and industry-standard environmental monitoring.
About CLARiiON
With more than 70,000 disk arrays and over 4 petabytes (4,000 terabytes) of usable RAID-protected storage shipped, the CLARiiON Advanced Storage Division of Data General Corporation is the leading supplier of advanced storage solutions to major computer system manufacturers, value-added storage resellers, and system integrators around the world. CLARiiON high-availability solutions are based on its Multidimensional Storage Architecture and feature a full range of flexible, scalable products for UNIX and Microsoft Windows NT platforms, including SCSI arrays, end-to-end Fibre Channel arrays, and enterprise storage management software. For more information about CLARiiON and its enterprise storage solutions, email infoclariion.com, or visit the web site at http://www.clariion.com
About Informix
Informix Corporation, based in Menlo Park, California, provides innovative database products that assist the world's major corporations attain competitive advantage. Informix is widely recognized as the technology leader for corporate computing environments ranging from small workgroups to very large parallel processing applications. Informix's database server, application development tools, superior customer service, and strong partnerships enable the company to be at the forefront of major information technology solution areas including data warehousing, high performance OLTP, and Web/E-Commerce. For more information, contact the sales office nearest you or visit our Web site at http://www.informix.com
About Sequent Computer Systems, Inc.
Sequent Computer Systems (Nasdaq:SQNT), the leader in Intel-based solutions for the data center, is committed to the success of its end-user and system integrator customers. Sequent's platform architectures and services are optimized for the scalability, availability and manageability requirements of corporate and institutional data center environments leveraging industry-standard technologies and best-in-class partnerships.
Sequent supports more than 10,000 installations worldwide, including many of the world's largest and most sophisticated OLTP, DSS and RDBMS applications. For further information, visit our Web site at http://www.sequent.com.