WebSphere Beats BEA and Oracle Performance By Over 37%

I wanted to take the time to congratulate some of my performance team members who have worked to prove our performance leadership, displacing both of the current top SPECjAppServer 2004 leaders - BEA and Oracle. You can see this documented in our latest launch press release here.

"A powerful IT infrastructure is also required to support the growing number of transactions across the enterprise, as well as with customers, partners and suppliers. IBM recently beat competitors by 37 percent in an industry benchmark that measures high-volume transaction processing that are typical in today's customer environments. IBM WebSphere Application Server established record-breaking SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark performance and scalability results involved more than 15,500 concurrent clients and produced 1,197.51 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard (jAppServer Operations Per Second), which translates into more than 4.3 million business transactions over the course of the benchmark's hour long runtime."

This shows our commitment to standard benchmarking organizations as I described in my last blog post. By leading this benchmark that was designed and approved by all participating SPEC vendors, IBM customers truly benefit from the demonstrated performance leadership.

We chose to lead in a category that matters most to our customers - per core performance. If you look at the result and the number of J2EE server cores and divide it out, we lead Oracle by 37% and smash BEA by 56% with approximately 300 JOPS/core. Comparing per core (CPU) normalized performance is really the best way to compare one application server and hardware stack to another. This demonstrates IBM's leadership of the industry in J2EE performance without question.

This result also shows the combined power of an IBM stack. Specifically, we achieved this by running WebSphere Application Server v6.1 on the IBM 5.0 JVM on AIX 5L V5.3 with an IBM POWER6 p570 server powered by two dual-core IBM® POWER6® 4.7 GHz processors against IBM DB2 Universal Database v9.1 running on a single POWER6-based server.

Congrats again to my team who yet again dominates where it matters - in customer focused standards based benchmarks.

SPEC is a non-profit organization that establishes, maintains and endorses standardized benchmarks to measure the performance of the newest generation of high-performance computers. Its membership comprises leading computer hardware and software vendors, universities, and research organizations worldwide. For complete details on benchmark results and the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, please see www.spec.org/. Competitive claims reflect results published on www.spec.org as of October 03, 2007 when comparing SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard per CPU Core on all published results.

A few pictures from London

I went to London for a couple days at the end of last week for a customer visit. My first time in London, but unfortunately the quick turnaround didn't leave much time for sightseeing. Here's a couple of my favorites pictures that I snapped: