INDUSTRY

HP and Microsoft Corp. today announced the world record benchmark result of 707,102 transactions per minute (tpmC) on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-C benchmark, establishing a new high water mark for commercial transaction processing on a non-clustered system. At a price to performance ratio of $9.13/tpmC, customers using HP Superdome, Microsoft(R) SQL Server(TM) 2000 and Windows Server(TM) 2003 Datacenter Edition can achieve industry-leading performance and scalability at a lower cost than any other high-end solution on the market. Building on their innovation, HP and Microsoft demonstrated the most powerful transaction performance solution with an HP Superdome server based on the forthcoming Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processor 6M (code-named Madison), running the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition for Itanium-based Systems and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), with HP StorageWorks MSA1000 storage. "HP's strong alliances with Microsoft and Intel enable us to deliver enterprise-class solutions based on open standards that meet the needs of our customers," said Scott Stallard, senior vice president, HP Enterprise Storage and Servers. "While competitors continue to tout expensive, proprietary systems, HP's portfolio of industry-standard solutions on IA-32 ProLiant and Itanium 2-based HP servers offer customers the agility, accountability and return on investment they expect in building an adaptive enterprise." "Microsoft and HP made history today with an unprecedented 707,102 transactions per minute," said Gordon Mangione, corporate vice president for SQL Server at Microsoft. "We are very excited about this result because it continues to demonstrate to customers Microsoft's price/performance advantage over proprietary solutions. This, combined with our world record clustered result, solidifies SQL Server and Windows Server as the true price/performance leader for database systems." Today's result with Microsoft builds on the performance leadership the HP Superdome server has established since its introduction three years ago. The server is on track to deliver up to triple its current commercial performance over the next several years. Through simple processor upgrades, Superdome customers can benefit from long-term performance scalability, flexibility and investment protection over competitive offerings. This summer, HP plans to release the Superdome server based on the Itanium 2 processor 6M (Madison).