IBM told the world that the new POWER7 range of servers were going to be fast.  We saw their benchmarks and read their white papers.  But I always reserve judgment until somebody else runs their own benchmark on a new piece of hardware.

  On the 7^th April 2010, SAP certified the new IBM Power System 780.  The system was loaded with AIX 6.1, SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 and DB2 9.7 as the RDBMS.  The rough specifications of the hardware are below. are as follows.

The POWER 780 in this configuration was rated at 202,180 SAPS, which makes this the highest performing system SAP have tested to date.

So is this a big deal?  What does this mean in the real world?

The previous server that the P780 knocked off the top spot was the Sun SPARC Enterprise Server M9000, certified on 14^th July 2008.  This server has 64 processors and 256 cores.  For software that is licensed on a per socket or per core basis the IBM 780 could offer a very attractive saving.  Maybe as much as 75%!

If we stick to comparing systems 8 processors (sockets) we can see the second best performing system is a Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 1800E.  This system was certified on 30^th March 2010 and features 8 x Intel Xeon Processor X7560 (a total of 64 cores) at 2.26Ghz with 512GB of memory running Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition.  This system is rated at 87,550 SAPS.  This means that Fujitsu system is rated at only 43% of the performance than the IBM 780.  In this case the software may cost the same to licencse as on the P780, but with less than half of the performance.

So it looks like the IBM Power 7 solutions really will live up to the hype.  However, I would love to see exactly the same certification but with Oracle 10g rather than DB2, just out of curiosity. 

For more details on SAP benchmarking see my article here.