Zeus and HP deal

British company Zeus Technology teamed up with HP to set a record for serving the most files in one day, breaking the one billion mark with a combination of Hewlett-Packard hardware and Zeus' Web server software.

The exact figure was 1.19 billion requests, or 13,811 operations per second, which the companies claim is equivalent to every person on the Internet accessing a file five times in a day, or more traffic than is handled by the top 10 Web sites combined. This breaks the previous record, set by Zeus and IBM, by 70%. The companies now hope to go on to break the two billion request-per-day mark.

Although Zeus is to bring out clustering technology that will allow Web sites to be transparently balanced over multiple servers, the record was broken on a single HP V2250 server with 16 PA-8200, 240MHz, 64-bit CPUs.

Zeus worked closely with HP engineers to achieve the result, fine-tuning the software to match the server's specifications.

Tony Occleshaw, IBM's marketing manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, questioned the validity of such benchmarks. "A lot of devious work has gone into benchmarks in the past," he said. "(The Zeus/HP machine) may be able to handle a large number of read-only transactions, but that is not ultimately what large sites need."