NEC server aces TPC benchmark
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A server from NEC has hit a new performance record in processing transactions, the company has announced.
A server from NEC has hit a new performance record in processing transactions, as judged by a set of benchmarks from the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), the company announced last week.
Dell, Fujitsu, IBM and Unisys also had servers in the top spots in the benchmarking bake-off.
The NEC Express5800/A1160 Scalable High Availability Server executed 1,568.22 transactions per second, in the TPC-E benchmark configuration (tpsE).
This performance has never been matched under the TPC-E benchmark, the company claims.
The tests, which were overseen by the TPC, were carried out in March. TPC is a nonprofit organization that develops database and transaction processing benchmarks, as well as referees tests made with these benchmarks. The TPC-E benchmark simulates an average Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) workload of a brokerage firm.
Although not many government agencies do process transactions, as least not to the degree that brokerage firms do, these results would still interest an information technology architect, as they represent how well a server can run a SQL-based database, noted Michael Nixon, NEC's director of product marketing for enterprise servers. Those trying to choose which one of a number of different servers to purchase can use these metrics as "a guideline" to help make a choice, especially in cases where in-house testing is not feasible, he said.
"TPC gives you a [standardized] measure of performance that you can use to gage the performance of different platforms," Nixon said.
The NEC server consisted of a set of servers running a total of 16 Intel Xeon X7460 2.66GHz processors, with a collective 512 GB of working memory. Software-wise the system ran Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Edition on Microsoft (R) Windows Server 2008 Datacenter x64 Edition. A NEC Database Software Microsoft(R) SQL Server 2008(R) Enterprise x64 Edition NEC Storage D3-10 unit provided storage.
On a price-performance scale, this server could be purchased for $1180.01 per tpsE, which is competitive, though not the best in the category. With price-performance is factored in, Dell took the top spot, with a Dell PowerEdge T610 that offered $334.09 per tpsE.
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