New Industry Benchmarks Feature Red Hat Enterprise Linux

There is no doubt that Oracle OpenWorld this year has drawn extra attention with the activity and speculation about the next steps in Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems. With the breadth of applications based upon Oracle’s premier database, Oracle OpenWorld has also set the scene for a number of announcements around industry-leading benchmarks from the technology leaders at the event, including Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the operating system used to establish several new benchmarks announced this week that demonstrate the performance and scalability of current x86 systems. Getting the most from multi-core systems requires an operating system, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, that can manage large thread counts and I/O throughput to deliver real application performance.

IBM announced three new results running different benchmarks in Oracle Application Standard Benchmarks. The benchmarks, which were developed by Oracle, represent typical user workloads on the E-Business Suite ERP deployment. The different scenarios focus on different types of ERP transactions such as payroll processing, or order transactions. In each case the benchmark combines batch processing and transactional workloads in a single test. Some of these steps are CPU intensive, while others stress I/O access. Data sizes and the number of users is defined as small, medium or large to assist Oracle customers in sizing their deployment.

The results are measured in transactions per hour, or throughput. IBM’s results were over 143,000 lines per hour on the order-to-cash benchmark, an increase of almost 40 percent over previous results. For the Payroll benchmarks, hourly employee throughput was measured at 207,612 on the medium database model and 364,786 on the large benchmark. The tests were performed using a single IBM System x3550 M2 with dual 4-core Intel Xeon 5500 processors on which the application server and the database instance were both deployed. The tests were run on 10 threads, oversubscribing the eight cores on the server.

The purpose of these benchmarks is to guide an Oracle customer in understanding their workload. With its broad hardware and software support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the operating system chosen to test these application workloads.

Also announced at Oracle OpenWorld by Oracle is a new SpecJappServer2004 result. Similar to Oracle’s application benchmarks, this industry-standard benchmark combines different activities to emulate data flow through an enterprise. Unlike Oracle Application Standards, the SpecJappServer2004 has a single size of data and results are reported in Java Operations per Second.

The tests were conducted using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 on HP DL785 with AMD 8439 processors. Deploying Oracle’s WebLogic server across 48 cores returned tremendous results. With a performance of 9,455.17 jopps/s, Oracle and HP set a new single node record, which was over 20 percent faster than the Sun Solaris on SPARC results published earlier this year.

As these benchmark results reinforce, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an operating system leader with broad application support and the ability to contribute to record-setting performance on the workloads that our customers’ businesses rely upon.

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