Partnership opportunities have arisen in the local channel for enterprise clustering thanks to the IBM, Intel and Microsoft collaboration to provide the world`s fastest server cluster for commercial use.
This is according to Juan Gunter, technical consultant for the IBM/Lotus business unit at Workgroup, who believes that the benchmark enhances the IBM business unit`s message of "partners in opportunity".
"There is a continual drive for vendors to work together, creating a larger support base for end-users. In addition, working together like this will have spin-offs in other IT areas," he says.
The tests recorded performance levels that triple the performance of Oracle running on a Sun Microsystems cluster, at one-third the price. Using the performance measurement technique agreed to by all computer makers (TPC-C), the alliance of leaders in industry-standard computing achieved record-breaking results in server performance.
The "Firestorm" performance benchmark, a TPC-C benchmark sponsored jointly by IBM and Microsoft, consisted of 32 IBM Netfinity 8500R servers running Windows 2000 Advanced Server and IBM UDB EEE.
With over 116TB of physical disk capacity configured for high availability using a combination of RAID 1 and RAID 5 arrays, using over 7 000 disk drives, the benchmark configuration is one of the largest data warehouses in existence.
In addition, IBM and Microsoft jointly decided on using DB2 instead of Microsoft SQL Server or an Oracle database management system in line with Microsoft`s support of a wide range of third-party enterprise applications on the Windows 2000 platform.
"Furthermore, Microsoft was interested in adding additional proof points to further validate both the scalability of Windows 2000 Advanced Server in distributed transaction environments and the advantages of the scale-out/shared nothing approach to database scalability," says Gunter.
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