BANGALORE, INDIA: Red Hat a provider of open source solutions, has announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has achieved a powerful, record-setting TPC-C benchmark that demonstrates the rapid improvements that open source software can bring to overall performance and costs. In its fifth TPC-C result over 1M tpmC, Red Hat reduced price performance to a level 20 percent lower than the best competing non-Red-Hat result with a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 on an IBM System x 3950 M2 with the new Intel X7460 Xeon processor.

In its latest 1M tpmC benchmark, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 outperformed all other operating systems on price performance in the 1M+ range. The Red Hat-based benchmark system delivered 1,200,632 transactions per minute and improved the price performance to $1.99, delivering a 20 percent savings in comparison to competitors. The single system proves its capability to handle substantial transactional workloads with its ability to process over 20,000 transactions per second. 

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides an extremely capable and reliable platform for customers' heavily demanding high-performance, high-scale platforms," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat. "We broke our first 1M tpmC barrier back in December 2003, which was two years before others in the industry, like Microsoft, reported their first 1M TPC-C results. With our latest record-breaking benchmark, we've again raised the bar for performance and cost-efficiency and have demonstrated proven benefits from the fast-innovating open source model."

In addition to its ability to handle challenging, high transaction-intensive jobs, the Red Hat-based, IBM solution offers headroom for growth and the opportunity to run simultaneous background jobs to produce bills and consolidate invoices, all while providing rapid response to customer orders and queries. In this TPC-C result, Red Hat also broke 100,000 operations per second perJava Virtual Machine for both bare-metal and virtual instances.  The overhead of virtualization registered at only 6 percent, proving the excellent performance delivered through Red Hat Integrated Virtualization technology.

"Through this record-breaking TPC-C benchmark, IBM has demonstrated our unique ability to deliver high performance for Linux workloads, leveraging the scalability of the industry's only Intel-based 8-socket server," said Sergio Amoni, director of Marketing, IBM System x. "Because IBM innovates with its own chipset for Intel-based servers, clients can take full advantage of the high performance x3950 M2 system with unbeatable reliability and power and memory technologies capable of up to 37 percent lower overall power consumption."