On the TPC-H test using a 3 TB database size, 64 of IBM’s xSeries 346s, each with a single 3.6 GHz Xeon processor with 2 MB of cache and 4 GB of main memory and a total of 26.3 TB of data was able to chew through 54,466 queries per hour (QPH) at a cost of $32 per QPH after a 15 percent discount.
The cluster ran Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 operating system and IBM’s own DB2 8.2 database. The cluster used InfiniBand interconnections from Voltaire to lash the machines together at the hardware level and the Integrated Cluster Extension (ICE) features of DB2 to lash them together at the software level.
The Linux cluster offered a little more performance than a 64-way Hewlett-Packard Co Itanium-based Integrity SMP server running HP-UX 11i Unix and Oracle 10 Enterprise Edition and a little less performance than a Sun Microsystems Inc Sun Fire 25000 server with 72 dual-core UltraSparc IV processors running at 1.2 GHz. That Sun box ran Oracle 10g as well, but on Sun’s own Solaris 10 Unix.