Sun Starfire posts SAP record

Palo Alto 12 Aug 99 Sun Microsystem has beaten the previous results in the SAP Retail Standard Application Benchmark test. The Sun Enterprise Starfire server processed 2,412,000 point-of-sale data line items per hour, and reached almost twice the performance results of the nearest test. The closest result was 1,345,000 point-of-sale data line items processed per hour in November 1998.

For the retail industry, the ability to cost-effectively handle a high volume of point-of-sale transactions from a central location is a business-critical issue. This Standard Application Benchmark validates the unprecedented ability of the combined SAP and Sun solution to deliver unmatched speed and volume performance in processing point-of-sale transactions.

The exceptional performance of SAP Retail on the Sun Enterprise 10000 servers also led to the solution's selection by COOP Switzerland. COOP is Switzerland's second-largest food retailer, and is also the country's largest consumer electronics supplier. "The combination of SAP Retail and Sun technology is a solution that we feel confident can support the volume and dispersed nature of the business we handle every day, but also accommodate the increases we expect as we expand in the coming century," said Kurt Uhlmann, project manager/IT architect at COOP Switzerland. "As a market leading retailer, we are turning to the market leading combination of SAP on Sun."

Running the highly robust and scalable Solaris^TM operating environment, the record-breaking results were achieved using a clustered Sun Enterprise 10000 solution and Sun StorEdge fibre channel subsystems. With only 24 CPUs designated to the Oracle database server, the Starfire server had significant capacity to handle a dramatically higher number of point-of-sale transactions. The tests were conducted at Sun's Large Scale Computing Center, in Beaverton, Oregon on June 13, 1999.

The configuration for this benchmark consisted of a 32-CPU server hosting Oracle and SAP R/3 message and lock management with an overall CPU utilization of 69%. The Oracle database was run on a 24-CPU processor. The system was configured with 40 GB of main memory running the highly robust Solaris 2.6 operating environment and Oracle8 Server 8.0.5. The benchmark utilized 2,241 GB of the Sun StorEdge and Sun StorEdge A3000 disk arrays.

Three Sun Enterprise 10000 application servers were used, two configured with 60 CPUs and one with 64 CPUs, running SAP Retail Release 4.0B. All application servers were configured with 64GB of main memory and had an average CPU utilization of 96%.

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