Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server Dominates Prominent ERP Benchmark

SAP maintains a suite of benchmark tests to demonstrate the performance of competitive systems on various SAP products. The SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark is a two-tier ERP business test that represents order-processing and invoice-processing workloads, while also demonstrating the ability to run both the application and database software on a single system.

Two-Tier SAP SD Results

• The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with 2.88 GHz SPARC64 VII+ processors (32 processors, 128 cores, 256 threads) supported 17,430 SD users using SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode) on the two-tier SAP SD Benchmark . This new benchmark complements the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server's standing world record result on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark with SAP ERP 6.0 and is the first published Unicode result on an enterprise-class system. Competitors, including IBM and HP, have not published two-tier SAP SD Unicode benchmark results on their enterprise-class systems, making the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, Oracle Database 10g, and Oracle Solaris 10 used in the new benchmark an attractive solution for customers seeking unparalleled scalability and unmatched application performance. Moreover, as of today, IBM has not been able to demonstrate any SAP SD performance number on a mainframe system, making the Sun platform even more attractive for enterprise customers.
• This result highlights the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server's performance leadership at the high-end of the SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark and underscores the optimal performance of SAP ERP running on SPARC64 systems with Oracle Solaris regardless of the encoding methodology used in the application. In January 2009, SAP released a new version of the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark for SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) software. The new version has higher CPU requirements that result in 25-50 percent fewer supported users compared to the previous two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 (non-Unicode) SD Benchmark. Ten to 30 percent of this performance impact is due to the Unicode encoding that introduces overhead for processing of the larger character strings. SAP has issued the following note covering this issue: On January 1, 2009, the SAP SD Benchmark was updated. Alongside the upgrade to SAP Business Suite 7 and the SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0, a number of additional, necessary updates were implemented. Business changes constantly, for example, Unicode and the use of the new general ledger are now common practice for SAP customers across all industries, and the SAP standard application benchmarks need to reflect this change. The updates are transparent; that is, the steps of the benchmark scenario remain unchanged.. Please be aware that these changes make the SAP SD benchmark more resource-intensive, which has a direct impact on the benchmark results.
• Unicode is a computing standard that allows the representation and manipulation of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Before the Unicode requirement, this benchmark used ASCII characters, meaning each was just one byte. The new version of the benchmark requires Unicode characters and the Application layer (where ~90 percent of the cycles in this benchmark are spent) uses a new encoding, UTF-16, which uses two bytes to encode most characters (including all ASCII characters) and four bytes for some others. This requires computers to do more computation and use more bandwidth and storage for most character strings.
• This result highlights the optimal performance of Unicode-based SAP ERP applications on Oracle’s Sun SPARC Enterprise servers running Oracle Solaris. Unicode enables seamless multilingual support when running various SAP applications and requires a different version of the software. Sun pioneered the usage of Unicode-based SAP software in several benchmark publications and gained significant expertise in lowering the additional resource consumption normally associated with Unicode software.

• Benchmark Results

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Source: SAP, www.sap.com/benchmark.Results as of October 12, 2009. Two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark: Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server (64 proc. / 256 cores / 512 threads UltraSPARC64 VII 2.52 GHz) running SAP SD benchmark based on SAP ERP 6.0 , Oracle Solaris 10, Oracle Database 10g, 39,100 SAP SD Benchmark users, Cert# 2008042. Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server (32 proc. / 128 cores / 256 threads UltraSPARC64 VII 2.52 GHz) running SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode), Oracle Solaris 10, Oracle Database 10g 17,430 SAP SD Benchmark users, Cert# 2009038.