Smashing world records again!

When breaking or setting a new world records, people typically think of a marginal gain or fractions of second like in the Olympics. This month Dell and Ingres announced that they have broken two records for the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s Industry Standard TPC-H benchmark across 300GB and 1TB data sets running VectorWise on a Dell PowerEdge R910 server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0. What’s unique about these new records is the magnitude by which the old standard was obliterated highlighting a new level of performance and price/performance leadership available on x86 servers.

Here are the results that speak for themselves:

  • The Dell and VectorWise 300GB benchmark delivered 330% of the previous best single-node performance leader, the HP ProLiant DL580 G7; an astonishing increase of 230%, with 400,931.8 QphH@300GB, versus HP’s previous high of 121,345.6 QphH@300GB. Price for performance came in at $0.35/QphH@300GB versus HP’s previous best of $0.65/QphH@300GB, thereby reducing the cost of performance by 46%Idea. Both results disclosed the TPC-Energy power/performance metric, which showed the Dell PowerEdge R910 only drawing 2.38 Watts/KQphH@300GB versus HP’s ProLiant DL580 G7, which drew 10.33 Watts/KQphH@300GB. Bottom-line: this means the Dell/VectorWise solution is much more energy-efficient!
  • The Dell PowerEdge R910 running the 1TB benchmark delivered an astonishing 251% of the previous best single-node performance leader, the IBM x3850 X5 8P; a151% increase, with performance of 436,788.9 QphH@1TBversus the previous high of 173,961.8 QphH@1TB. The price for performance came in at $0.88/QphH@1TB, 36% less than the previous best price for performance at $1.37/QphH@1TB[ii]. While both platforms used the latest Intel Xeon E7 processor technology, the R910 only used 4 processors and onboard SAS drives, while IBM used an 8-way and 7 solid-state drive (SSD) adapters!

The Transaction Processing Council (TPC) provides objective third-party tools that offer test environments with verified vendor results. TPC-H specifically is a decision support benchmark that measures how systems would perform in running complex data applications, including: data warehouse, data mining, and financial/business analysis applications. This benefits customers looking to deploy ERP, CRM, or other business workloads with unbiased information to help them evaluate different solutions with performance and price/performance information.

So what does this mean for users? Not only is it possible for users to leverage open standards in their data centers… it’s the best way to get great performance on mission critical applications. The benchmarks help showcase the advantages of Dell’s open, capable and affordable philosophy in action. Our 11G PowerEdge servers, including the R910, offers easier integration with new and updated technologies, improved scalability and a solid foundation for real-time information retrieval and analysis helping users grapple with increasing volumes of data. If you want to find out more about our world recording breaking accomplishments visit www.dell.com/benchmarks.


Idea Top two non-clustered 300GB TPC-H results as of 5/4/11: Dell PowerEdge R910, availability 6/30/11, compared to HP ProLiant DL580 G7, availability 9/14/10.

[ii] Top two non-clustered 1TB TPC-H results as of 5/4/11: Dell PowerEdge R910, availability 6/30/11, compared to IBM System x3850 X5, availability 5/20/11.

TPC and the benchmark name TPC-H are registered trademarks of the Transaction Processing Performance Council. The TPC believes that comparisons of TPC-H results measured against different database sizes are misleading and discourages such comparisons.

About the Author: David J. Morse