Lumbering sluggers come out ducking and weaving

OK – that’s as far as I intend to go with sport metaphors. I’m talking about IBM and Oracle and where their long-term war is taking them next.

You’ll remember that Oracle bought Sun Microsystems early last year for $7.4 billion. Since then, IBM has been hoovering up customers. In August, market researchers IDC were saying that IBM had grown its Unix revenues by 15 percent in the second quarter and its market share by 6 percent. Adding that Oracle had lost share.

IBM claims that in the second quarter, its Power Systems unit acquired 334 customers from competitors, with 210 of those coming from Oracle. And, just to show that they are on a war footing and it’s not just friendly rivalry, IBM says that its formal migration program, which entices customers to move to IBM systems, has gained 7,210 server and storage customers from rivals since its inception in 2006.

There is a third player on the pitch – HP – which has been experiencing pretty dire times itself recently. IBM’s saying it’s acquired 110 users from HP. HP recently announced that Meg Whitman, the former CEO at eBay, will take over from Leo Apotheker, who’s only been there a year. Why dump Apothekar? No other reason than the company losing half it’s market value in the time Apothekar has been in charge!

There were even rumours (and, who knows, it might still happen) that Oracle would scoop up HP and add it to its own portfolio. Others suggest that the problems Oracle experienced with Sun’s SPARC hardware business may convince it to keep away from HP’s Itanium. Perhaps IBM might buy HP? That last sentence should come enclosed in tags!

But after a longish period of haemorrhaging its Sun SPARC users and having to put up with IBM’s suitably smug grins, Oracle has now announced its high-end SuperCluster system powered by its new T4 SPARC chip. With an estimated 50,000 SPARC customers, it’s a business well-worth hanging on to.

The SuperCluster T4-4 is a general-purpose system offering a claimed 33 percent more price/performance than IBM’s largest Power servers and (again claimed) more than 50 percent more price/performance than an Itanium-based Integrity server from HP.

The SuperCluster is powered by Oracle’s eight-core T4 chip, which Oracle claims offers five times the performance of the current 16-core T3. The SuperCluster also includes the capabilities of Oracle’s existing Exadata database system and Exalogic cloud-in-a-box offering, both of which are powered by x86 chips from Intel.

The SuperCluster runs the current Solaris 10 operating system or the new Solaris 11, and will run any applications that its SPARC customers might run.

We can only wait and see what IBM will produce when it comes out of its corner. It certainly knows that the fight is back on.

DB2 – faster than a speeding bullet?

Last week, IBM sent out press releases saying that it has achieved the industry's highest ever TPC-C (transaction processing) benchmark using a Power Systems configuration with DB2, hitting 10,366,254 transactions per minute. And in case you don't realise just how fast that is, the press releases goes on to inform us that it beats HP's best result by more than 2.5 times and Oracle's best by more than 35%!

We're told that: "The results place IBM in a unique position as the undeniable leader. With these new clustered results (and with the long-standing single system result), IBM has demonstrated its ability to scale up to handle higher transaction loads and to scale out to optimize more types of workloads than the competition."

This result is the largest ever TPC-C result published (dated 17 August 2010) and was obtained on a cluster of three IBM Power 780 servers featuring a storage subsystem with 116TB of Solid State Drives (SSDs) and running DB2 9.7.

Just to rub in the fact that it beats the Old rival, Oracle, the press releases goes on to inform us that: "The IBM result represents 2.7 times better performance per core than the Oracle result, 41% better price performance, and 35% better energy efficiency per transaction. IBM's performance is also more than 2.5 times better than HP's best result, 69% greater performance per core, and 2.1 times better price/performance."

The new TPC-C benchmark result uses standard IBM software. DB2 9.7 has been around since June 2009, and AIX 6.1 was released in November 2007. IBM says that the selection of software versions reflected levels currently in use by a large number of their clients.

IBM highlights the fact that the IBM TPC-C results on POWER7 technology shows off IBM Storage technology in the form of Solid State Drives (SSDs), which enable higher throughput and lower response times. SSDs also provide reliability, lower energy usage, less cooling requirements, and the ability to reduce data centre footprints. The total storage used was over 800TB while the Oracle/Sun configuration had 686.6TB of total storage.

The Oracle/Sun cluster is 71% more expensive based on published price/performance relative to the IBM Power 780 cluster result. The total system cost of the Sun cluster is 26% greater than the total system cost of the IBM cluster. Because of different discount structures, care should be taken in comparing individual price components.

As a result of these differences, the TPC does not allow comparisons using TPC price information on anything other than the total configuration. The IBM Power 780 with DB2 9.7 result yields greater than 10 million tpmC for IBM (a feat Oracle hasn't accomplished) and significantly better price/performance for the IBM solution.

The configuration for this benchmark achieves an estimated consumption of 65.1 kWatts or 6.3 kWatts per million tpmC, 35% better than the Sun cluster energy consumption estimate of 73.9kWatts or 9.7 kWatts per million tpmC.

You get the idea anyway – there's more of the same in the press release. The bottom line is that IBM can now claim to provide performance in excess of double-digits (10 Million Transactions Per Minute), which, they say, no-one else can do.