The curious case of the mis...

While helping a colleague to answer some questions of a customer, i've was somewhat puzzled about the fact that there aren't many new SAP SD benchmark result IBM Power systems. There is just one result. It's a small p550 with 4 Power6 CPUs. But i forgot about that, because i had many other things to do.

Jan Brosowski wrote about an interesting speculation in his blog article "Es liegt vor allem an Solaris", which could explain this development.

His blog article is in german, thus i will summarize the interesting part here in english: There is a new rule in the SAP-SD benchmarking. When you have to separate the application server and the database server into two separate virtual machines (like using two LPARs) it isn't a 2-tier benchmark, it's a 3-tier benchmark. You could speculate, if IBM needs this separation to get all the horsepower of the large systems onto the street. Perhaps to have better control on used resources or just to improve the scalability of the system (perhaps you remember the TPC-H benchmark that used 32 IBM p570 nodes in a 32 system images configuration instead of a 8 system images configuration as you are able to connect 4 p570 nodes into a single system as an example of a strange benchmarking configuration that didn't used the scaling capabilities of a system). You could speculate if there's a scaling challenge in the IBM systems (in the HW or in the OS) when used with a single OS image. Such an challenge can be solved by using partitions. But with partitions activated, they couldn't submit a 2-tier SAP SD result.

Well ... from my point of view i get more and more cautious when IBM tries to extrapolate the big systems performance in benchmarks by using the results of smaller systems even when they introduce a scaling correction factor. I would really like to see a SAP SD 2-tier result of a p595 or at least a full-blown p570.