Sun and Oracle have set a world-record result for a two-processor system on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark.

The Sun Fire X4270 server with two new Intel Xeon x5570, quad-core (2 processor/8 cores/16 threads), 2.93 GHz processors, running SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application (Unicode) with Oracle 10g on top of Solaris 10 delivered the highest two-processor Unicode result for the benchmark, achieving 3,800 SAP SD Benchmark users.

The returns from Sun and Oracle outperform the best results from IBM and HP/Microsoft utilizing the same number of cores on the benchmark. IBM reported a score of 3,752 SD users with the IBM System 550 server, equipped with four POWER6 processors (8 cores, 16 threads) and DB2 9.5, while HP ProLiant BL460c G6 (2 processors/8 cores/16 threads) with SQL Server 2008 achieved 3,415 SD users.

The Sun-Oracle finish means the Sun Fire X4270 server and Oracle Database are currently the fastest eight-core system combination on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application benchmark, delivering more performance per processor and per core.

The two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark measures the system performance to process dialog steps and order line item postings per hour for SAP solution-based transactions. The BestPerf blog explains a new version of the benchmark was released back in January - the two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) Standard SD Benchmark, which has higher CPU requirements. The new benchmark yields from 25-50% fewer users compared to the previous two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 (non-unicode) Standard SD Benchmark. According to the blog, 10-30% of this is due to the extra overhead from the processing of the larger character strings due to 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. Before the Unicode requirement, this benchmark used ASCII characters meaning each was just 1 byte. The new version of the benchmark requires Unicode characters and the Application layer (where ~90% of the cycles in this benchmark are spent) uses a new encoding, UTF-16, which uses 2 bytes to encode most characters (including all ASCII characters) and 4 bytes for some others. This requires computers to do more computation and use more bandwidth and storage for most character strings.

More Information

SAP Benchmark Website

BestPerf blog [...read more...]

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