IBM HS21 XM BLADECENTER User Manual

IBM posts leadership 2-processor performance result on new TPC-E
benchmark

IBM BladeCenter HS21 XM delivers top 2-processor performance on next­generation OLTP benchmark

August 13, 2007 ... IBM® has published a leadership 2-processor performance result on TPC
Benchmark™ E (TPC-E), the next-generation OLTP benchmark launched by the Transaction
Processing Performance Council (TPC) in March 2007.

The business model for TPC-E is that of a brokerage firm, for which the database schema, data
population, transactions, and implementation rules have been designed to be broadly
representative of modern OLTP systems. This new benchmark is designed to enable clients to
more objectively measure and compare performance and price of various OLTP systems.

The system under test was a single IBM BladeCenter® HS21 XM, used as the database server
running Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 Enterprise x64 Edition SP2. The HS21 XM blade achieved
a performance result of 169.59 tpsE (transactions per second E) at price/performance of
$1,897.66 USD / tpsE, with total solution availability of August 10, 2007.

The HS21 XM blade server used the Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5160 at 3.00GHz with a
4MB L2 cache and 1333 MHz front-side bus (2 processors/4 cores/4 threads) and Microsoft
Windows® Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition.

About TPC-E

The TPC-E benchmark is the successor to TPC-C, the long-time, popular standard for comparing
On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) performance on various hardware and software
configurations. TPC-E is designed to more closely reflect the technology and transaction
complexity that is typical of today’s client application environments.

The TPC-E benchmark models a brokerage firm with customers who generate transactions
related to trades, account inquiries and market research. The brokerage firm in turn interacts with
financial markets to execute orders on behalf of the customers and updates relevant account
information. The TPC-E benchmark is scalable, meaning that the number of customers defined
for the brokerage firm can be varied to represent the workloads of different-size businesses.

The benefits of TPC-E include a:

• Familiar business model that is easy to understand

• Balanced mixture of disk input/output and processor usage

• Sophisticated database schema that reflects the complexity found in modern applications

• Workload that is representative of a broad segment of real-world OLTP systems

The TPC-E metrics are tpsE (transactions per second E) and $/tpsE. The tpsE metric is the
number of trade-result transactions the server can sustain over a period of time. The
price/performance metric, $/tpsE, is the total system cost for hardware, software, and
maintenance, divided by the performance.

Results referenced are current as of August 13, 2007. To view all TPC results, visit www.tpc.org.
IBM and BladeCenter are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business

Machines Corporation.
Intel and Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation.
Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States
and/or other countries.
TPC, TPC Benchmark, TPC-E and tpsE are trademarks of the Transaction Processing
Performance Council.
All other company/product names and service marks may be trademarks or registered
trademarks of their respective companies.