This TPC-A number is nearly 100 percent higher than any other TPC-A number reported to date by any vendor running a non-proprietary database, including vendors of mainframe, massively parallel or SMP systems.
"Online transaction processing (OLTP) was the primary database direction of the 1980s. In the 1990s, corporations need to leverage their online data to maintain competitive advantage. This will fuel the growth of a second technical wave called data mining with system requirements even more extreme than OLTP," said Ross Bott, general manager of Silicon Graphics' Information Products Division. "Not only does Silicon Graphics offer the industry's leading transaction processing performance, but it also provides the most powerful hardware platform for this new level of data analysis."
Silicon Graphics' Challenge servers are uniquely suited to meet the needs of users who want to move their customer data off mainframes, organize it and analyze it to gain a better understanding of consumers' behavior and interests. Utilizing sophisticated consumer databases, data mining enables organizations to conduct pattern recognition and identify trends in industries such as transportation, media, manufacturing, retail, financial services and telecommunications. Silicon Graphics' visual computing expertise enables the company to deliver a client/server architecture that is optimal for multimedia databases and the database visualization applications required for this new level of analysis.
The Challenge SMP architecture has already established itself as a powerful database server technology. In November 1993, Silicon Graphics announced an unmatched TPC-B performance number of 1,786 transactions per second by running Oracle7 on a 28-processor Challenge server. In addition, all the major relational database and object database management products are available for Silicon Graphics servers.
"The TPC-A performance record which Silicon Graphics and Oracle are announcing here is another dramatic demonstration of the scalability and high-end power of Oracle7 and Silicon Graphics' Challenge systems," said Jerry Baker, senior vice president, product line division for Oracle Corporation. "We look forward to extending this power into the data mining market with EDS and Silicon Graphics using the parallel query capabilities of Oracle's latest 7.1 release."
Challenge servers for the database market are available through Silicon Graphics' OEMs, systems integrators and value-added resellers. These relationships will provide turnkey solutions and integration tools and services to meet the needs of the commercial marketplace. For example, Silicon Graphics and EDS recently announced a multi-year strategic alliance to deliver high-performance decision support databases and multimedia information management solutions to consumer-focused companies worldwide. In addition, Tandem Computers is an OEM of Challenge servers, focusing on online transaction processing markets.
"Achieving this outstanding TPC-A result is a significant accomplishment that reconfirms the considerable capabilities of the Silicon Graphics Challenge systems as database servers," said Toby Tobaccowala, president, Media Division, of EDS' Communicatios Industry Group. "These systems possess the extremely high performance levels that are mandatory for data mining, which is a key reason why EDS chose to ally itself with Silicon Graphics. Combining these strengths with our dbINTELLECT(tm) product line creates a powerful database decision support offering for the marketplace."
The highly scalable, binary-compatible Challenge server product family includes the Challenge XL enterprise system with up to 36 R4400(tm) MIPS(r) RISC processors for the highest levels of performance and expandability; the Challenge L departmental system with up to 12 R4400 processors, offering price/performance leadership; and the Challenge M single-processor workgroup server.
Silicon Graphics, Inc. is a leading manufacturer of high-performance visual computing and data server systems. The company delivers interactive three-dimensional graphics, digital media and multiprocessing supercomputing technologies to technical and commercial environments through direct and indirect channels. Its subsidiary, MIPS Technologies, Inc., designs and licenses the industry's leading RISC processor technology for the computer systems and embedded control markets. Silicon Graphics, Inc. has offices worldwide and headquarters in Mountain View, California.
