HP and Microsoft claim benchmark record

Hewlett Packard (HP) and Microsoft have jointly claimed that they have broken the record for the world's fastest single-system Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) online transaction processing benchmark.

Setting a mark of 658,277 transactions per minute, it has been "verified by an authorised TPC auditor" and was achieved by an HP Superdome server based on Intel's Itanium 2 processors running the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit).

The server was configured with 64 Itanium 2 processors, 512GB of memory and an HP StorageWorks Modular Storage Area Network Array 1000.

HP said it plans to commercially release similar Itanium-based Superdome servers later this year.

"We are extremely pleased with today's benchmark result and believe that it is solid proof that HP has the technology and database solutions expertise to deliver Windows online transaction processing performance like no other vendor," said Scott Stallard, senior vice president, HP Business Critical Systems.