TPC Press Release

Contact:
Forrest Carman
Owen Media for the TPC
206-322-1167 x118
forrestc@owenmedia.com

Transaction Processing Performance Council Announces 20th Anniversary Workshop Series

Organization also previews several benchmarks in development for release next year

October 14, 2008 — The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), a non-profit organization that defines transaction processing benchmarks and distributes vendor-neutral performance data to the industry, today announced a 20th anniversary workshop series for end users. The workshops will be held in various locations throughout the United States; the first one is scheduled for November 19 in Dana Point, California.

During the workshops, the TPC will provide an overview of its current benchmarks and how they may be used in making server procurement decisions. The TPC is also previewing several benchmarks that are in development for release next year; the organization is exploring several promising areas, including energy consumption, ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) and service-oriented architecture.

Attendees for the workshops include influencers and decision-makers on the procurement side for computer equipment.

“Over the past 20 years, the TPC has helped to dramatically improve both the performance of the underlying products at a system-wide level and the quality of results that end users can expect from their server benchmarks,” said Wally Katz, vice president and senior analyst at Ideas International. “The industry now expects benchmarks to be relevant to the real world and expects them to be backed by a stringent and independent review process, as the TPC provides. In this respect, the TPC benchmarks are the most transparent source of quality performance and cost-of-acquisition data available to the industry.”

The TPC was established in August 1988 by eight leading software and hardware companies; today there are 25 member companies that encompass major systems and software vendors throughout the industry. The TPC’s volume of published results has risen significantly, along with the industry acceptance of TPC benchmarks. Approximately 55 TPC benchmark results are published by member and non-member companies each year.

The TPC currently has four active benchmarks: TPC-C and TPC-E for online transaction processing, TPC-H for decision support for ad hoc queries and TPC-App for business-to-business transactional Web services.

With its two-decade history, the TPC has developed several benchmark elements that define the organization and have earned it the reputation of providing the most credible results in the industry:

• Consistent price/performance – the TPC is the only organization that provides consistent scores that enable end users to clearly understand the actual cost of performance of a system
• Extensive auditing process – the TPC has extensive fair use policies and requires an independent audit of all results prior to publication
• Broad industry support – the TPC has the support of major systems and software vendors, and benchmarks are not exclusive to any particular system or hardware
• Whole system testing – the TPC tests entire system performance, not just one component, thus providing end users with cross platform performance comparisons

The TPC continues to lead the industry in database performance benchmark standards,” said Mike Molloy, chairman of the TPC. “Over the last 20 years, benchmarks like TPC-A, TPC-B, TPC-C, and TPC-D created a solid foundation for a complete, system-level performance evaluation of database implementations. By being database agnostic, the TPC has allowed many different vendors to participate in the comparisons. Many new database companies have recently joined in the activity of running and publishing their results. With TPC-APP, TPC-H and TPC-E, the organization continues to evolve new performance benchmarks. We look forward to the next 20 years with even more new members and new benchmarks.”

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 25 full members: AMD, Bull, Dell, Exasol, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens, Fusion IO, Greenplum, HP, Hitachi, IBM, INGRES, Intel, Kickfire, Microsoft, NEC, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, Teradata, Unisys, Vertica, and VMware.