Oracle beats IBM with Sun, CEO says in OpenWorld 2009

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy, Chairman of the Board and cofounder of Sun Microsystems, announced a new world record TPC-C benchmark result for Oracle Database 11g running on Sun SPARC servers with CMT technology and the Sun Solaris. This result, according to Ellison, proves that the Oracle-Sun combination runs faster than IBM DB2 running on IBM's flagship Power 595.

The Oracle-Sun benchmark used an innovative combination of Sun's fast CMT servers to power the database, along with Sun's new flash technology to speed I/O. Oracle Real Application Clusters allowed Sun and Oracle to scale performance on a 12-Node Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 cluster.

Oracle Real Application Clusters is in production use at thousands of customers, enabling transparent scaling of real-world business applications. With this benchmark, Oracle and Sun become the first vendors to achieve world record TPC-C performance results using Flash Storage technology, said John Fowler, executive vice-president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems.

Using the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, Oracle and Sun were able to set the world record using eight times less hardware than IBM used for its largest benchmark. The Oracle-Sun configuration consumed four times less energy than the IBM configuration even though it ran 26% faster. It also demonstrates 16 times better transaction response times than the IBM benchmark. Oracle Database 11g running on the Solaris 10 Operating System achieved a record-breaking 7.7 million tpmC at $2.34/tpmC.

"I don't know what building smarter planet means (as IBM's goal is to build smarter planet), but we want to build smarter computers," Oracle CEO Ellison said during the keynote.