SPARC Supercluster with 27 SPARC T3-4 Servers Demonstrates World Record Performance on TPC-C Benchmark

(As of Thursday, 02 December 2010)

Oracle demonstrates the world's fastest database performance on a SPARC Supercluster with 27 SPARC T3-4 servers running Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition with Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Partitioning. The new world-record TPC-C benchmark result beats the next best TPC-C result posted by IBM by nearly 3x in throughput performance while delivering more than 3x better average response time for New Order transactions. Moreover, this result represents 26 percent better price/performance.

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is a non-profit corporation founded to define transaction processing and database benchmarks. TPC Benchmark C (TPC-C) is an online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark that simulates a complete computing environment and has a balanced mix of transactions executed against a database. TPC-C benchmark is applicable to any industry that must manage, sell, or distribute a product or service.

The results of TPC-C benchmark are represented in transactions per minute (tpmC) and generally accepted by the industry as measure of transactional database performance. TPC-C benchmark allows across-the-board performance comparisons of solutions presented by different vendors and includes detailed pricing data for each configuration that is used to determine price per transaction.

All results must go through an audit process before they are available to general public. The audit is conducted by an independent body and ensures compliance with TPC rules as well as objectivity and reproducibility of results.

• Oracle used the SPARC Supercluster configuration that consisted of 27 of Oracle’s SPARC T3-4 servers, 138 of Oracle’s Sun Storage F5100 Flash arrays, and 97 Sun Fire X4270 M2 high-capacity storage servers to showcase the massive data capacity and accelerated I/O performance needed for this complex OLTP benchmark. When combined with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition using Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Partitioning the solution delivered a world-record TPC-C benchmark result of 30,249,688 tpmC with a price/performance of US$1.01/tpmC. This best-in-class configuration for clustered databases is available on 6/1/11.
• Used as the building block in the record-setting SPARC Supercluster configuration, the SPARC T3-4 is the modular, quad-socket server powered by the SPARC T3 processor, delivering massive throughput of up to 512 compute threads and 512 GB of memory in just 5RU of space. Additionally, the SPARC T3-4 server offers high I/O bandwidth and includes integrated 10 GbE networking and on-chip cryptographic acceleration. These features make the SPARC T3-4 an excellent platform for clustered Oracle Databases.
• On the storage side, the record-setting SPARC Supercluster utilized Oracle’s Sun FlashFire technology for database acceleration in conjunction with Sun Fire X4270 M2 high-storage capacity servers that were also used to store mirrored database logs. The Sun Storage F5100 Flash arrays were used for database storage and provide sub-millisecond I/O response times as well as much higher I/O rates than traditional disk in only a fraction of physical space with much lower power consumption. Each array measures only 1RU, consumes only 300 W and has almost 2 TB of ultra-fast Sun FlashFire storage.
• The record-setting SPARC Supercluster configuration consisting of 27 SPARC T3-4 servers beats the performance of the IBM Power 780 server cluster with POWER7 processors and IBM DB2 9.7 database by nearly 3x and has 26% better price/performance with the TPC-C benchmark.
• This ground-breaking TPC-C benchmark demonstrated that the SPARC Supercluster with 27 SPARC T3-4 servers surpasses the performance of the HP Superdome (1.6GHz Itanium2) by 7.4x while having 66% better price/performance.
• With this world record performance result, Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition with Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Partitioning demonstrated excellent scalability across 27 SPARC T3-4 servers and extreme data throughput capability with 138 Sun Storage F5100 Flash arrays.
• The TPC-C world record result clearly demonstrates that Oracle's integrated approach to engineering and deploying hardware and software together results in industry-leading performance.

TPC Benchmark C, tpmC, and TPC-C are trademarks of the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). 27-node SPARC T3-4 Cluster with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition with Real Application Clusters and Partitioning, 30,249,688 tpmC, $1.01/tpmC, Available 6/1/11. 3-node IBM Power 780 Cluster with IBM DB2 InfoSphere Warehouse Ent. Base Ed. 9.7, 10,366,254 tpmC, $1.38 USD/tpmC, available 10/13/10. HP Integrity Superdome with Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition, 4,092,799 tpmC, $2.93/tpmC, available 8/06/07. Response time claim is based on average response time of New Order transactions in TPC-C benchmark. Source: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc, results as of 12/2/10.