ACADEMIA

Voltaire, the leader in interconnect solutions for high performance grid computing, today announced a new world record result for price/performance for a 3 Terabyte (TB) TPC-H benchmark. The new mark was achieved using the IBM DB2 Integrated Cluster Environment (DB2 ICE) and Voltaire Grid Interconnect solutions and delivered the best price/performance in the 3 TB category. The new benchmark demonstrated a greater than 200 percent increase in price/performance over any other clustered solution and more than a 75 percent increase over SMP-based solutions. The results of the benchmark demonstrate the customer benefits of a unified hardware/software solution leveraging InfiniBand-based interconnect, a solution that delivers top-tier performance for almost one-third the price/performance of the HP/Oracle solution that previously held the number-one ranking. As data volumes increase exponentially, the scalability and performance of DB2 using Voltaire Grid Interconnect are often cited as key reasons why customers and business partners are choosing IBM over competitors. "This new result clearly demonstrates the powerful combination of industry-standard platforms and InfiniBand interconnect is an excellent alternative to proprietary SMP-based architectures in the data center," said Patrick Guay, vice president, marketing, Voltaire. "Customers looking to run data warehousing and business intelligence applications using high-end, grid-based configurations can scale out and get great performance at a very attractive price point." The cluster utilized for the benchmark was composed of 64 IBM eServer xSeries 346 systems with Voltaire Grid Interconnect running DB2 Universal Database v8.2 on SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9. The cluster delivered a performance of 54,465.9 QphH for a price/performance of $32 per QphH. DB2 ICE is a pre-packaged Linux database cluster solution that helps businesses of any size implement a low-cost, high performance database platform utilizing IBM DB2 for Linux and IBM eServer systems. Part of the DB2 ICE solution, Voltaire Grid Interconnect solutions consist of InfiniBand-based hardware and software switching solutions that enable high performance applications to run on distributed server, storage and network resources. Voltaire Grid Interconnect solutions enhance the scalability and simplifies the deployment of large clusters - increasing communications of the systems by up to 10 times over traditional methods.