Benchmark games - today: The german "Power6 brings the truth to daylight"-campaign

IBM understands the art of nonsensical comparision to perfection. IBM Germany tries to convince the customers, that Sun is extremly expensive. Okay, at first: They use the oldest trick in their portfolio again. Comparing a new system with an old system. The p570 is a system introduced last year. The UltraSPARC IV+ with 1.8 GHz was introduced in August 2006. We´ve introduced the UltraSPARC T2 and the SPARC64-based system since. Okay, but let´s play the game of IBM. Just for fun … Lets do a more sensible sizing with actual hardware. At first: You never run your SAP on a single system. At this moment we´ve already already busted the calculation of IBM. Two times 0,80 Million Euros makes 1.6 Mio Euros, compared with 1,54 Mio calculated by IBM for Sun. In case you really want to use a single p570 for your SAP you are toast in case of a failure of the system or when you want to do maintainance on the system. So. You´ve two ways to get to 20000 SAPS with Sun hardware. The first one is the more unconventional one: You can use 2 T5220. Each of them has over 10000 SAPS. You can use LDOMS or Container for the virtualized instances. Let´s assume the biggest available standard configuration: 46,900 Euros per system (SEDPFJF1Z). You can get the 20000 SAPS configuration for under 100.000 Euros. They take 4 Rackunits. Okay, let´s take three. Now you can do an HA failover without performance impact. This is a little bit more expensive: 150.000 Euros. 1539 Watts and 6 rack units. Okay, different scenario. You want more single-thread performance on you system? Okay, let´s make a fast sizing. We use two M5000 with eight 2.15 SPARC 64 VI procs. Both systems together have vastly more performance than needed, but by doing so you haven´t a large impact on performance in the case of failure or maintainance. Listprice with for the 8 proc 64 GB config: 139700 Euros. The virtualisation of the instances is done with Solaris Containers. The proposed config costs you 280.000 Euros list price (SEFPCDB1Z) and takes 20 rack units. What does IBM try to sell you: A p570 with 16 Rack units, no redundant system for 800.000 Euros. No wonder that they used old systems for this comparision. Compared with actual Sun systems the configuration proposed by IBM isn´t a bargain anymore. It looks extremly expensive now. PS: You find their comparision on the IBM website. What an utter nonsense.