IBM today announced that a 256-core Power 795 system with DB2 nearly doubled last month's record to achieve the highest result ever published on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark with a result of 126,063 SAP SD benchmark users.

IBM says its system easily eclipsed Oracle/Sun results on the two-tier SAP SD standard application, handling more than three times the number of SAP SD users than a 256-core Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 (Oracle's largest system) and the 128-core Oracle result on the two-tier SAP SD-Parallel standard application benchmark published in September running four clustered 32-core Sun Fire X4470 servers with Intel's Xeon X7560 chip. The IBM benchmark is more than four times higher than HP's 128-core Integrity SD64B result (HP's largest) on the two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark.

The 256-core POWER7-based 795 running the AIX 7.1 operating system, DB2 9.7 information management software and IBM System Storage also surpassed its own world record result on the two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark achieved last month on a 128-core Power 795, demonstrating impressive 90 percent, near-linear scaling. The result is also the first to break the 500,000 SAPS (SAP Application Performance Standard) level on a single system with more than 688,000 SAPS, a measure of system throughput of business deliverables, such as customer sales orders or invoices.

"This outstanding result demonstrates once again the innovation and performance leadership of IBM POWER7 technology, Power Systems and DB2," notes Jeff Howard, director of IBM Power Systems. "It nearly doubled the leading result achieved just a month ago on a 128-core system, demonstrating that Power and DB2 can scale to meet the exploding growth in data and data-creating devices. SAP applications are critical for businesses around the world in industries ranging from distribution to industrial to financial services, retail and more. As businesses reach more clients online -- and handle input from credit-card readers, RFID tags, smart energy meters and other devices -- the combination of Power 795 and DB2 running SAP applications can scale to help meet their growth requirements."

More on Power 795

The IBM Power 795 can support up to 256 cores. When using the latest optional PowerVM virtualization software, it allows customers to run more than 1,000 virtual servers on a single physical system, enabling a substantial improvement in operating efficiency and levels of server, storage and network virtualization. IBM reports that this allows customers running SAP applications to consolidate onto fewer servers - or even a single Power 795 - vastly simplifying their infrastructure and reducing costs in data center floor space, energy, management resources, and database and web application software.

For more on Power benchmark leadership and IBM workload optimized systems, check out http://www.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/benchmarks/ and http://www.ibm.com/systems/smarter and http://www.sap.com/benchmark.