Cluster Computing:

ORACLE CLUSTERS ON DELL SERVERS SET LEADING BENCHMARKS

Oracle announced an industry-leading SAP Sales and Distribution (SAP SD) Parallel Standard Application benchmark on Dell PowerEdge servers running Linux, proving the power of standards-based servers to deliver high- performance, low-cost computing.

This new leading result of 1,350 SD users, with an average response time of 1.97 seconds, was achieved by Dell using SAP R/3 Enterprise Release 4.7 SRI and Oracle Real Application Clusters running the SAP SD workload on a two- node Dell PowerEdge 6650 Linux server cluster with four Intel Xeon MP 3.0 GHz processors per node. According to previously published SAP-certified benchmark results, Oracle Real Application Clusters delivers higher performance than the best SAP SD 2-tier eight processor Windows-based server results from IBM and Microsoft.

"Combining Oracle's database software with Dell hardware gives our customers leading performance at a very low cost," said Richard Sarwal, vice president of Server Performance, Oracle Corporation. "This benchmark result shows that Oracle Real Application Clusters enable customers to support a large number of SAP users on clustered, standardized 4-way servers, which not only saves money on hardware, but also delivers high availability for the entire system."

Oracle adds this result to a long list of SAP SD benchmarks. Oracle holds the top six SAP SD 2-tier Standard Application benchmark results and the top four SAP SD Parallel Standard Application benchmark results. Oracle is the number one preferred database for SAP deployments, and continues to innovate to maintain its leadership. Today's announcement is an example of the close engineering partnership between Oracle, Dell and SAP to provide customers with fast, reliable and scalable database technology.

"Dell's partnerships with Oracle and SAP are critical to helping our customers achieve unprecedented value and performance when deploying business- critical databases and applications," said Linda York, vice president of Global Alliances in Dell's Product Group. "Together we are demonstrating that standards-based solutions are more scalable and cost-effective for the enterprise."