* Benchmark results for Fujitsu’s PrimePower
In buying servers, IT managers may look at benchmark information or not. It seems for Unix-based servers benchmark information is important, but for x86 Intel or AMD servers, that information has little value. With that in mind, Fujitsu is relying on tried and true benchmarks to sell Unix servers to the customers who care about performance tests.
The company’s latest benchmarks hit the street last week, as Fujitsu released results of SAP tests on its PrimePower servers, which use the Sparc processor and Sun’s Solaris operating system.
“When we introduced PrimePower we said we were going to do a series of announcements where we were increasing performance,” says Richard McCormack, executive vice president of product marketing for Fujitsu. “We are moving up to the 2-GHz range for our platform… We gained the No. 1 position in the SAP benchmark known as SD, where we cranked out a dramatic number with a 128-processor PrimePower.”https://www50.sap.com/benchmark/
The SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark simulates an order entry and fulfillment process. It creates an order for five items, creates delivery data for the order, displays the customer order, changes the delivery date, lists 40 orders for one sold-to party and creates an invoice.
The PrimePower supported 21,000 users on the SD benchmark, more than its closer competitor, a 64-processor IBM eServer p5 Model 595, which supported 20,000 users. The results are posted here:
In the test, PrimePower’s average response time for completing the steps in the dialog was 1.91 seconds, hardly the fastest but high up there. The fastest response time was 0.51 seconds, achieved on a Sun Fire V40z with four processors and only 600 users.
“By no way shape or form do we think it’s the end of the road for Sparc Solaris,” McCormack says. “This release is just another good proof-point in keeping Sparc Solaris in the mind’s eye of customers.”
Fujitsu declined to say what percentage of its total server revenue is represented by Sparc-based PrimePower servers.
The company is announcing five new models of PrimePower that exceed a 2-GHz clock speed. PrimePower servers range from two processors to 128. The servers, which Fujitsu claims are designed to run the most business-critical applications, support both hardware partitioning and virtualization technology.
