IBM RS/6000 SP Sets Pace for Business Intelligence
Study Predicts Surge in Extremely Large Databases
SOMERS, N.Y (September 09, 1998) – – IBM leads the industry in performance for both small and large Business Intelligence applications, according to new benchmark testing.
The RS/6000 SP*, configured with IBM’s award-winning AIX operating system, DB2* Universal Database Enterprise-Extended Edition, and IBM’s Serial Storage Architecture disk technology, set record-breaking Transaction Processing Council (TPC-D) benchmarks on Aug. 17 for a 300GB database using IBM’s new 332 MHz SMP nodes.* TPC results are available at http://www.tpc.com.
This benchmark, along with industry-leading one terabyte results published on May 11, demonstrates that in measures of speed, the ability to serve large numbers of concurrent users, and in price/performance, the IBM RS/6000 SP outpaces its competitors for BI systems with large database requirements.
Why this benchmark really matters
A new survey of Business Intelligence by Palo Alto Management Group, Inc. (PAMG) shows three trends at work: a rapidly growing market for Business Intelligence expenditures, even faster growth in database sizes and explosive growth in the number of people needing access to the information these databases can provide. Taken together, these trends emphasize the need for scalable systems.
“We see the worldwide market growing at an average annual rate of better than 50 percent through 2002, when we expect it will hit $113 billion,” said Michael Burwen, director of the study. “We also estimate the average database size of 272GB today will increase 24 fold in next three years to 6.5 terabytes, while the average number of users, currently around 2,200 persons, will grow by a factor of 42 to nearly 100,000. High performance, highly scalable systems like IBM’s RS/6000 SP are the only ones that can accommodate these dramatic growth factors without having to go through the pain and expense of having to redesign the platform architecture.”
PAMG also found IBM was the leader among the eight companies that together account for 47 percent of the worldwide data warehousing/decision support solutions business.
“These results go beyond bragging about benchmarks,” said Michael J. Borman, general manager, IBM RS/6000. “This is testament to the importance of total-system scalability and to the SP’s outstanding parallel-processing capabilities in that area. These benchmarks prove that IBM offers the most scalable and affordable solutions for our customers whether their databases are big, bigger, or biggest.”
The SP’s Numbers and the Competition
For example, when compared to the Sun UE10000, IBM’s latest results are significantly better with 29% greater power and 84% greater throughput with 44% better price/performance. When compared with the NCR 5150, IBM’s closest competitor, the SP has 33% more throughput and 51% better price/performance.
IBM’s performance levels were achieved while running 16 streams in the throughput test. This is important to customers with large databases and concurrent users because the throughput metric is much more indicative of performance in that type of environment.
Source: IBM