Taking another broad stride forward in propelling Intel-based Windows NT technology into a market currently dominated by UNIX/RISC systems, Unisys Corporation has announced that its Aquanta QS/2 Server achieved 18,154.00 transactions per minute (tpmC) and a price per transaction of $25.49/tpmC. This is the best price/performance recorded for any system tested under the Transaction Processing Council`s "C" benchmark methodology, the computer industry`s standard method of measuring transaction processing performance.
Not only is the QS/2 equipped with four Intel Pentium II Xeon microprocessors, faster by substantial margins than leading four-processor UNIX/RISC servers, but its price per transaction is less than half. TPC test results posted for comparable UNIX/RISC systems as of 31 July 1998 were 11,559.70 tpmC at $56.60/tpmC for the Sun Microsystems Ultra Enterprise 450 and 9,853.13 tpmC at $64.22/tpmC for the IBM RS/6000 Workgroup Server F50.
"Until now, UNIX/RISC architectures were comfortably entrenched in the market for the large-scale, high-performance applications that run today`s enterprises," said Aquanta`s product manager, Gavin Boxall. "The tests give customers clear, overwhelming and indisputable evidence of the enormous price/performance advantages offered by Unisys servers based on Intel processors and the Windows NT operating environment. The results prove conclusively that customers have a viable alternative to UNIX for large-scale enterprise applications."
For the test, the QS/2 server was configured with four GBytes of memory and eight SCSI RAID controllers. It ran the Microsoft Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition 4.0 operating system and the Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition 7.0 database management system.
"These tests are early evidence of our success in applying decades of Unisys experience in large-scale, mission-critical computing to the challenge of boosting the enterprise capability of Intel and Microsoft technology," continued Boxall. "Our momentum in realising the goals of our enterprise Windows NT business is only beginning to build. It will realise its fullest potential when servers built on our mainframe-class Cellular MultiProcessing architecture bring mainframe-class partitioning, scalability, resilience and manageability to the market."
About Unisys SA
Unisys South Africa Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of Unisys Corporation. Unisys is a service and technology company with over 60,000 clients in more than a hundred countries. Locally, the company is a major supplier of information services and technology to financial services, government, communications and other commercial markets. Unisys South Africa employs 550 people and serves 200 major corporate clients via 38 service locations, of which 19 are franchisees and 14 are resident points. Access the Unisys home page on the World Wide Web - http://www.unisys.com - for further information.
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