Two-node Sun Enterprise Cluster posts industry record OLTP record, outperforming all competitors in database performance test

PALO ALTO, Calif. - October 7, 1997 - Once again breaking records and setting a new watermark for performance, Sun Microsystems, Inc., has demonstrated the superiority of its Enterprise servers over all other competitive offerings for online transaction processing (OLTP) applications. The Sun Enterprise Cluster, configured with two Enterprise 6000 high-end departmental servers and Sun SPARCstorage disk arrays, beat the closest competitor, Hewlett Packard, by 31 percent on the Transaction Processing Performance Council Benchmark C (TPC-C) test. Overall, Sun posted a TPC-C test performance result of 51,871.62 transactions per minute (tpmC), with a price/performance of $134.46. The benchmark was run on the Sun Enterprise Cluster using the Oracle8 database while running the powerful Solaris 2.6 operating environment. "Although our Sun Enterprise Cluster technology was designed specifically to provide high availability for business-critical applications, it also provides industry-leading scalability as demonstrated by the OLTP performance in this benchmark test," said David Yen, Vice President and General Manager of Sun's Enterprise Server Products Group. "Our model of designing clusters based on `fat' nodes -- meaning fewer servers with high CPU counts -- provides a cluster solution that is easier to administer and less costly to manage. We're giving our customers the option to cluster because they want to improve availability, not because they have to in order to meet desired performance levels," says Yen. "With this result Sun and Oracle have once again raised the bar for delivering performance for robust network-centric computing," said Jerry Held, senior vice president of Server Technologies at Oracle Corp. "However, the real advantage for customers is the higher availability, scalability and reliability of Sun's Enterprise Clusters combined with Oracle8, which will meet the increasing demands of large-scale OLTP and network computing environments. With Sun's new Enterprise Clusters and Oracle8, customers will have the added flexibility of being able to install a database on a single node and then add nodes with near-linear scalability as demands of the enterprise grow."

New Sun Enterprise Cluster

Announced today, the Sun Enterprise Cluster technology is designed to dramatically cut network server downtime and deliver outstanding scalability for mission-critical environments. The new solution allows customers to combine any four systems from the Sun Enterprise server family, from the workgroup to the data center, ensuring availability near 100 percent. The largest four-node configuration from Sun delivers 256 CPUs, 256 gigabytes (GB) of memory and 12.8 GBs/second of sustained I/O bandwidth to a single application or a larger number of smaller applications -- scalability well beyond the grasp of most competitors.

Scalability Through Clustering

Unlike many competitive offerings, the outstanding scalability of Sun Enterprise servers is sustained when systems are clustered. Performance of a single-node Enterprise 6000 server with 24 UltraSPARC CPUs is 31,147 tpmC, the two-node cluster result announced today with 44 UltraSPARC CPUs posts a performance result of 51,871.62 tpmC. Comparing these results show a clustered system would produce 1.8 times the performance of a single node -- demonstrating that Sun continues to deliver powerful scalability through the cluster configuration.

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