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October 2, 2008

In recent independent tests, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL) ver. 5 Advanced Platform trumped all other operating systems that process more than one million transactions per minute. At a 22.1 percent lower cost than its next closest competitor, Red Hat's new platform is being noticed by some observers.

The San Francisco-based TPPC (Transaction Processing Performance Council, which performs benchmark testing of database transactions, validated Red Hat's processing of 1.2 million transactions per minute on an IBM System X 3950-M2 with the new Intel X-7460 Xeon processor.

However, Red Hat's high ranking in the million-plus category didn't extend to the top ten list on price/performance ratio because there are many less expensive competitors that can't scale to the same volume.

Total IBM/Red Hat hardware and software costs were $1.99 per transaction, which is 22.1 percent lower than the next less expensive hardware/software combination, (IBM/AIX,) at $2.81 per transaction and 304 percent less than the most expensive combination, HP-UX/HP Integrity Superdome, at $8.33 per transaction to exceed the million-transaction threshold.

The TPC-C price/performance results measure online transaction processing rates and cost.

The test results clearly reveal that Linux running on x86 chips can scale to high volume with commodity hardware at the most economical price-to-performance ratio, according to Red Hat marketing manager Andy Cathrow.

So far, no Windows-based operating system performed as well, and Unix systems with faster performance cost 50 percent more.

Red Hat also processed more than 100,000 operations per second per JVM (Java Virtual Machine) for both bare-metal and virtual instances. Comparisons are difficult because results vary on different virtual machines. Nonetheless, Red Hat operated with less overhead, which translates into less performance loss because of virtualization, according to Red Hat.

Cathrow added "this puts transaction processing within reach of every customer. They don't need Unix for their highest workloads. Linux is fine enough, and Red Hat seems the best OS in town for intensive, CPU-hungry applications and databases."

Typically, hardware vendors publish only those results they know will be favorable to their products, Cathrow said. IBM chose Red Hat because IBM knew it could scale to maximum performance on its DB2 database...

John Shakshober, Red Hat's director of performance engineering, noted that Red Hat has a precedent for breaking records and surpassing rivals. In 2002, Red Hat was the first to break the million mark with clustered servers. Now it has broken the record with just one single server. Not only is it the first million-transaction processor running standard x86 architecture, but it's on the new Intel-based Xeon 7400 with a six-core CPU, he said.

The tests, which were completed on Aug. 19, often take months to perform, he said.

Joe Clabby, the president of Falmouth, Maine-based Clabby Analytics, said TPC's benchmarks are a good measure of transaction processing and, in turn, computing power, and show which vendors are leading at any given point in time.

Such performance standards are good news for buyers because it confirms that Linux can indeed perform high transaction rates at low cost, Clabby said. And by affirming Red Hat as the Linux TPC-C leader and validating IBM's strong performance as well, that's good news for Red Hat and IBM combined he said.

Source: eBusiness News.

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