Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server Delivers New Four-Processor Record on Two-Tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark

(As of Tuesday, 21 July 2009)

Oracle's Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server (4 processors/32 cores/256 threads) running Oracle Solaris and Oracle Database 10g delivered the highest four-processor result on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark, an industry-standard measure of ERP performance. This breakthrough score confirms the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server as the leading four-processor server on the two-tier SAP SD benchmark running the new SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application (Unicode), as of July 21, 2009.

The SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark is a two-tier ERP business test that represents full business workloads of order and invoice processing, while demonstrating the ability to run both application and database software on a single system. The SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments.

The latest SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application (Unicode) enables seamless multilingual support, and brings extra overhead related to processing the larger character strings associated with Unicode encoding. Unicode is a computing standard that allows for the representation and manipulation of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. SAP maintains a suite of benchmark tests to demonstrate the performance of competitive systems on various SAP products.

Competitive Comparisons Table

• The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server, equipped with four 1.6GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus CPUs using SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application (Unicode), posted the best four-processor result on two-tier SAP SD benchmark, supporting 4,720 benchmark users.
• This benchmark proves that the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server, running Oracle Database 10g on top of Oracle Solaris, is well-suited to act as an enterprise-class ERP server that provides supreme levels of compute density per RU.
• The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server surpassed the competing four-processor (8 cores/16 threads) IBM System 550 server by 26% with 3,752 SAP SD users.
• The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server delivers 30 % more SAP benchmark users per RU when compared to the IBM System 550 server, equipped with fastest available POWER6 processors and running the IBM AIX 6.1 OS with DB/2 9.5 database.
• The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server delivers more SAP benchmark users, when compared to the HP Proliant DL 585 G6 server, equipped with four of the latest six-core AMD Opteron processors Model 8439 and running the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition OS.
• 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.
• The result also highlights the vertical consolidation capability of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server, which ran both the SAP application and database software on the same physical system.

• Benchmark Results

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Results of the SPARC Enterprise T5440 (4 processors/32 cores/256 threads), Oracle Solaris 10, Oracle Database 10g, SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode): 4,720 SAP SD Benchmark users; 25,830 SAPS. Fully processed order line items/hour: 516,670, Dialog steps/hour: 1,550,000, Average database request time (dialog/update): 0.110 sec / 0.169 sec, CPU utilization: 96 %. The SAP certification number was not available at press time and can be found at http://www.sap.com/benchmark. Results of the IBM System 550 (4 processors/8 cores/16 threads), AIX 6.1, DB2 9.5, SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode): 3,752 SAP SAP SD Benchmark users, 20,520 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009024. Results of the HP ProLiant DL585 G6 (4 processors/24 cores/24 threads), SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode) results: 4,665 SAP SD Benchmark users, 25,530 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009025. Results as of July 15, 2009. For more details, see http://www.sap.com/benchmark.