Merrill Lynch & Co’s latest look at the competitive landscape reiterates its previous finding that users don’t buy benchmarks, they buy a relationship (CI No 3,822). It does believe that sustained differences in performance and price-performance can affect vendor financial results. It points to its latest survey of corporate buyers in which 42% said they do look at performance benchmarks such as TPC-C and TPC-D in making server purchase decisions while 58% said no. Moreover the survey apparently finds a shift in demand from best-of-breed products to solutions, suggesting that speeds and feeds are of declining importance. While performance can be important to a company’s positioning – as in Silicon Graphics’ case – it can also have far less consequence, as in IBM’s case. Based upon the most recent TPC-C numbers – where Compaq Computer Corp’s six-node Windows NT clusters won top honors in the mid-range brokerage – Merrill thinks NT servers may be poised to overhaul Unix in this space. This benchmark is a window on the future as NT progresses into the enterprise, it believes. Meantime data warehouse benchmarks are now emphasizing streams as a more accurate way of assessing real-world performance because they reflect how concurrent users use the warehouse better than single-stream evaluation. More streams represents more concurrent users accessing the database. In the most recent TPC-D evaluations, IBM took the performance lead at 1Tb using seven streams while NCR led at the 300Gb size of warehouse with even more streams.
