INDUSTRY

HP and Oracle today broke through a key technology performance barrier, becoming the first companies ever to top 1 million transactions per minute on the Transaction Processing Council's TPC-C benchmark. The result was achieved running Oracle Database 10g, an HP Integrity Superdome server and Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. The benchmark not only sets a new industry record, but also reflects the power of industry-standard servers running the UNIX® operating system in "scale up" single server configurations. HP and Oracle achieved 1,008,144.49 tpmC with a price/performance ratio of $8.33/tpmC. This result is 30 percent faster than achieved by the nearest competitive hardware vendor. The benchmark configuration consisted of a (non-clustered) 64-way HP Integrity Superdome running HP-UX 11i v2 with Oracle Database 10g and used HP StorageWorks Virtual Arrays 7110 configured with 36 gigabyte and 73 gigabyte drives. With today's result, HP now holds the top three TPC-C performance results, including the top UNIX, Linux and Windows® results.(1) "HP and Oracle offer the choice, scalability and flexibility to meet customer needs," said Rich Marcello, senior vice president and general manager, Business Critical Servers, HP. "Today's benchmark result is a prime example of HP's leadership with Integrity servers running Oracle and of our joint work to build a platform to support our mutual customers' most demanding requirements as well as scale with them as their business grows." HP and Oracle have a long history of performance leadership. The combination of HP Integrity servers and Oracle has held a leadership position in single system OLTP performance across all other Linux and UNIX solutions. Furthermore, HP also published the first TPC-C 64-bit Linux benchmark on Oracle Database 10g. "Oracle and HP together have always delivered outstanding performance and price-performance for our joint customers," said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Oracle Database Server Development. "Today's results show that Oracle Database 10g scales to the highest level of performance on a single, large UNIX server and gives customers an excellent platform for deploying their highest performance database workloads." "This benchmark demonstrates the benefits of using the Intel Itanium 2 processor for world-class performance computing and shows the flexibility of Itanium-based HP servers running HP-UX," said Mike Fister, senior vice president, Enterprise Platforms Group, Intel Corp. "We're confident that as IT managers look to find the most competitive solutions for their enterprise needs, the combination of Oracle on HP Integrity servers based on Intel processors is the natural choice for performance, with significant benefits in ease of manageability and lowest total cost of ownership." The benchmark results announced today follow the record-breaking benchmark on an HP Integrity server running Linux recently announced at OracleWorld San Francisco.(1) In addition, HP Integrity servers, ranging from one- and two-processor to 64-processor systems, have established dozens of record benchmark results on multiple operating systems and workload categories. (1) Source: Transaction Processing Council (TPC) www.tpc.org. As of November 4, 2003: • HP Integrity Superdome server running HP-UX 11iv2, HP StorageWorks solutions and Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition achieved 1,008,144.49 tpmC, at $8.33/tpmC, available April 14, 2004. • HP Integrity Superdome, 824,164.53 tpmC, $8.28/tpmC, available Dec. 31, 2003 • HP Integrity Superdome running Microsoft® SQL Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition achieved 786,646 at $6.49/tpmC, available December 31, 2003. • HP Integrity rx5670, 136,110.98 tpmC at $3.94/tpmC, available December 31, 2003.