SAP Benchmarks revisited

There is a new benchmark from Sun for SAP on the SAP website. SAP certified the benchmarking of the Sun Fire X4600 with quadcores. This benchmark result is especially interesting when you compare it to another 8 socket system - the HP ProLiant DL785. Both systems have the same basic characteristics:

The Sun hardware:

Sun Fire X4600M2, 8 processors / 32 cores / 32 threads, Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor 8360 SE, 2.5 GHz, 128 KB L1 cache and 512 KB L2 cache per core, 2 MB L3 cache per processor, 128 GB main memory

The HP hardware:

HP ProLiant DL785, 8 processors / 32 cores / 32 threads, Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor 8360 SE, 2.5 GHz, 128 KB L1 cache and 512 KB L2 cache per core, 2 MB L3 cache per processor, 128 GB main memory

The Sun system uses Solaris 10 and MaxDB 7.6, the HP system uses Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and SQL Server 2008.

The Sun system yields 5,800 SD Users and 29,670 SAPS (SAP Benchmark Certificate: 2008061). The HP system yields 5,230 SD Users and 26,180 SAPS (SAP Benchmark Certificate: 2008026). That´s quite a difference, but not the end of the story: The Sun result is a 6.0 unicode result, the HP is a plain 6.0 result. You may remember: You loose at least 15% (depends on the systems) performance by using unicode. That´s a really impressive benchmark result. It´s the fastest 8 socket x86 SAP benchmark result at the moment.

As both system uses different operating systems and different databases, you can´t say if it´s a bad idea to use SAP on HP or a bad idea to use SAP on Windows/SQL Server