UNISYS CLAIMS NEW 8-WAY SERVER IS WORLD'S FASTEST INTEL-BASED SMP SYSTEM.

Unisys Corp. announced last week that its Aquanta ES5085R eight- processor server achieved the fastest online transaction processing (OLTP) performance ever recorded for an Intel-based symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) server.

The test results show Unisys pushing Intel servers running Windows NT further into territory once dominated by more costly UNIX/RISC technology.

The ES5085R achieved 40,670.05 transactions per minute (tpmC) in the test, which was conducted using the Transaction Processing Council's "C" methodology, an industry standard measure of OLTP performance. The price per transaction was $18.42/tpmC, which Unisys says is the best OLTP price/performance for any eight-processor server. Pricing is based on data posted on the TPC web site (www.tpc.org).

It compares, for example, to TPC-C test results for the Hewlett-Packard 9000 Model N4000 Enterprise Server introduced this summer, which delivered 49,308 tpmC at a price per transaction of $56.67, over three times the price of the Aquanta ES5085R server. The tested Unisys configuration will be available on December 31. The hardware is available now.

"These test results are a wake-up call for enterprises investing in UNIX/RISC technology," says Don Johnson, general manager of Aquanta Enterprise Server Business at Unisys.

"They constitute a clear signal that, when combined with enterprise computing characteristics added by Unisys, Intel-based servers running Microsoft operating system and database software have achieved the performance needed to push serious, data-center-class business computing to the next level," Johnson says. "Just wait until you see the next generation of Unisys Intel-based servers."

The ES5085R, which ran NT 4.0 and SQL Server 7.0 database, was equipped with eight 550-MHz Intel Pentium III Xeon processors with 2 Mbytes of Level 2 cache.