PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0 on Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and X6270 Blades
Results of the PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0 benchmark on Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and X6270 blade servers are available. This benchmarking report is particularly significant, writes Giri Mandalika in his Scratchpad blog, because the workload has both online transactions and batch processes and, furthermore, it is the first time Sun has published a PeopleSoft benchmark on x64 hardware running Oracle Enterprise Linux.
The Sun Storage Solutions white paper “Turbo-charging HPC Application Performance with Flash Storage: Changing the Focus from Processing to Moving Data Faster” contends that, with ever more CPU cores and more GFLOPS per core, HPC application performance will be determined by the ability to move data in and out of fast processors. This paper examines how Flash technology can be deployed and the effect it will have on HPC workloads. It examines various Flash technologies and compares their performance on leading HPC application benchmarks. Finally, the performance characteristics of the Flash-based Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System is described.
Although it was never intended by its developers to be used as a benchmarking tool, the dd utility — a simple, basic utility — is nevertheless frequently used as a sequential workload generator for quick tests, writes Lisa Noordergraaf in the blog “Pitfalls of Benchmarking Flash with dd(1M).” She recommends vdbench as an alternative.
Sun Fire X4640 Server Fastest on SAP and SPEC Benchmarks
The new Sun Fire X4640 server delivered outstanding performance on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark, which represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments, and the SPECompL2001, which represents workloads consisting of medium and large problem sets that stress the computer’s processor, memory, compilers and OpenMP implementation. The Sun Fire X4640 is an 8-socket modular x64 server in a single 4U chassis that supports up to 48 cores.
Query Volume, Speedup Ratio Increases on Oracle Database 11g, Release 2
The Sun BestPerf blog “Oracle Flash Cache — SGA Caching on Sun Storage F5100″ posted by Senthil Ramanujam reports on the combination of new features delivered by Oracle and Sun’s Flash Cache technology and its effect on the improved database performance of the Sun Storage F5100. The benchmark results in this blog deal with the performance of Oracle Database 11 (Release2), which enables extending the System Global Area (SGA) size and caching beyond physical memory, to a large flash memory storage device as the Sun Storage F5100 flash array.
Eight-processor World Record Set with Four Sun Blade X6270 Module Nodes
The Oracle Database garnered another honor with the world record it set on the SAP Sales and Distribution-Parallel Standard Application Benchmark with the SAP Enhancement Package 4 for ERP 6.0 (Unicode). Set on a cluster of four-node Sun Blade X6270 server module nodes, each with two Intel Xeon x5570 quad-core 2.93 GHz processors and running the Solaris 10 OS, the performance was near linear in scalability.
Curious about the impact of virtualization on benchmarking results? Jan Brosowski blogged in SAPonSun about testing two “half-box” virtual machines on the same box. He discovered a striking difference.
Oracle Offers Companies $10M in Performance Challenge
A new world record TPC-C benchmark result has been set for Oracle Database 11g running on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers with CMT technology, along with Solaris 10 and the new Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array. Oracle reports this world record proves that the Oracle-Sun combination runs faster than IBM DB2 running on IBM’s flagship Power 595. Oracle believes so much in Sun hardware, it is offering companies $10 million if one can prove Oracle Database 11g runs at least twice as fast on IBM’s fastest computer.
As reported on earlier, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server running OpenSolaris 2009.06 source code and the Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) software (version 1.6.0_14 Performance Release), posted a single-chip world record on the SPECjbb2005. An entry on the BestPerf blog takes a closer look at these results and points out the significance of this single chip world record, which resulted in 231464 SPECjbb2005 bops and 28933 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM.
