SCIENCE

BLUE BELL, PA -- The Unisys e-@ction Enterprise Server ES7000 is the world's fastest server for e-commerce by a margin of 38 percent, according to the TPC-W benchmark, an industry-standard measure of server performance. The benchmark results announced today reportedly “prove once again” that the Unisys ES7000 delivers performance levels once possible only on costlier UNIX/RISC servers or mainframe computers. The Unisys ES7000 server's price/performance was 21.5 percent lower than that of the previous TPC-W record holder. By lowering the cost of entry to high-volume e-commerce, the Unisys ES7000 helps customers to tap the operational efficiencies, revenue growth opportunities and markets offered by the Internet. The new world performance record was achieved using the Transaction Processing Council's "W" methodology, the industry's premier measure of computing power and performance for e-commerce. In the test, the Unisys ES7000 delivered 10,439.6 Web interactions per second (WIPS) @ 100,000 items ("items" indicates the relative size of a simulated online store). The cost per WIPS was $106.73 @ 100,000 items. The configuration is currently available and is based on a Unisys ES7000 equipped with 16 900-MHz Intel Pentium III Xeon 32-bit processors and 6 Gbytes of memory. In setting the new record, the 16-processor Unisys ES7000 outperformed the previous TPC-W performance record holder, a 12-processor IBM e-Server xSeries 430 with IBM Netfinity 4500R. The IBM system had results of 7,554 WIPS @ 100,000 items and $136.80 per WIPS @ 100,000 items. That server became available on June 8, 2001. "By achieving unprecedented performance with Intel and Microsoft technology at an affordable price, the Unisys ES7000 is making large-scale, serious commerce over the Web a mainstream way of doing business," said Mark Feverston, vice president, Unisys Server Programs. "As a result, a much broader array of enterprises will be able to take advantage of the improved flexibility, responsiveness and cost efficiency the Internet offers to businesses and their customers." In the test, the Unisys ES7000 ran Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, Microsoft's operating system for the most demanding computing environments, and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition database management system. "SQL Server 2000 continues to demonstrate the ability to perform at the top of TPC scalability benchmarks," said Gordon Mangione, vice president of SQL Server at Microsoft Corp. "This result shows that the Unisys ES7000, with SQL Server 2000 and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, delivers affordable, mainframe-class performance to large-scale Internet commerce companies." TPC-W was designed specifically to measure database server performance and price/performance in an online transaction processing (OLTP) e-commerce setting. The TPC-W benchmark models businesses (retail store, software distribution, airline reservation, electronic stock trades, etc.) that market and sell over the Internet. This demanding benchmark is the first standard, objective method of comparing complex e-commerce environments in realistic configurations. It measures key factors affecting e-commerce server performance, such as extreme network loads and to balance loads to maintain consistently fast response time. The incorporation of new functions specific to Web-based commerce, such as secure credit card transactions, persistent "shopping cart" simulations, consumer-to-business transactions, business-to-business transactions, 7x24 availability, dynamic advertising and large Web objects make this test one of the industry's best approximations of a real-world server use environment. The Unisys ES7000 is based on the Unisys Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) server architecture, which provides an array of computing capabilities required for enterprise-class e-business computing that are well known to users of large-scale computers, but unprecedented in computing environments using Microsoft and Intel technology. The ES7000 was designed for the power of Intel 64-bit Itanium processors. Using CMP's powerful partitioning capabilities, Itanium and Pentium III Xeon processors can run side-by-side within one server. These and other advantages enable CMP-based servers to match the performance of UNIX systems in enterprise-class e-business and other critical applications at a fraction of the price. For additional information visit www.unisys.com