TPC Press Release

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Amber Ukena
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TPC Launches Updated Web Services Workload Benchmark: TPC-App

New pricing specification for all TPC benchmarks also unveiled

San Francisco, May 16, 2005—The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) today announced the availability of the TPC-App benchmark, a transactional application benchmark test designed to simulate business-to-business Web services workloads as well as retail e-commerce interactions. TPC-App enables a realistic assessment of a typical customer application server environment and allows for measurement of business-to-business Web transactions. The TPC also announced the creation of a common pricing specification, which creates consistent pricing rules across all TPC benchmarks and enables verification of all pricing results.

“The TPC saw a strong need to provide both an industry standard application server benchmark as well as a Web services benchmark. With the creation of TPC-App we now have both,” said Mike Molloy, TPC chairman. “TPC-App will serve as a driving force in the improvement of transaction environments, and our pricing improvements provide more accurate price/performance data to TPC benchmark users.”

TPC-App utilizes multiple Web service interactions to simulate the business activity of an online retail or business-to-business environment. Each of these interactions is subject to a response time constraint. TPC-App measures the number of Web service interactions processed per second (SIPS) per application system. This benchmark also measures the system’s “total SIPS,” a performance metric tallying the total number of SIPS for the entire tested configuration, and the associated price per SIPS.

TPC-App is the only vendor-neutral, software and hardware agnostic, online transaction processing benchmark to measure the SIPS rate and the associated price per SIPS in a business-to-business environment. The provision of a SIPS benchmark that is not constrained by software and hardware specifications allows consistent comparison across various software platforms such as Java vs. .NET environments. It also enables hardware platform comparisons and opens the door for measurement of new and emerging application server technologies and standards. TPC-App also accommodates both clustered and non-clustered results and is capable of evaluating transactional features beyond traditional database transactions.

“As part of its ongoing efforts to refine its benchmarks to better reflect current customer environments, the TPC has evolved TPC-W into TPC-App,” said Richard Partridge vice president and senior analyst of server research for Ideas International. “We believe this new Web service benchmark will be an important gauge of the transaction performance and price/performance of Internet-driven application servers. We look forward to seeing results obtained using this new test suite."

Additional features of TPC-App include 100 percent managed code for easier implementation, execution and tuning; tightened caching and application server offloading opportunities; and secure and encrypted communications. TPC-App requires a modest I/O subsystem to run, which makes it a more affordable benchmark.

Like all TPC benchmarks, TPC-App includes price/performance data and is vendor neutral, allowing for open, unbiased competition among vendors. TPC-App is currently available for use in benchmark testing.

New Pricing Specification
The TPC’s updated pricing specifications create consistent price/performance measurements across all TPC benchmarks and enable verification of all pricing results. The inclusion of pricing data in TPC results provides a broader measurement than performance alone. Pricing data also helps to keep the size of server configurations more realistic. TPC benchmarks are the only transaction processing benchmarks to include price/performance data. The new TPC pricing specifications apply to all benchmark results compiled after August 31, 2005 if not recognized by the benchmark spec prior to that date.

About the TPC
The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is a non-profit corporation founded to define transaction processing and database benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable TPC performance data to the industry. The TPC was established in August 1988 by eight leading software and hardware companies. The TPC currently has 20 full members: AMD, BEA, Bull, Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, Netezza, Novell, Oracle, SGI, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, Teradata and Unisys.

About the TPC Benchmarks
The TPC has three active benchmarks:

• TPC-C: Online transaction processing (OLTP)
• TPC-H: Decision support for ad hoc queries
• TPC-App: Business-to-business transactional Web services workload