DG tops SAP's R/3 benchmark

Data General has announced its best benchmark results to date for SAP's leading R/3 application suite running on Microsoft Windows NT Server with an Intel Pentium processor-based server.

A total of 936 users were certified by SAP, but the record was set with SAP's R/3 Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark running on Data General's recently released AViiON 4900 and 3600 servers using Intel's Pentium Pro 200 MHz processors. The average dialog response time was 1.91 seconds.

The R/3 SD benchmark is designed to perform typical business transactions of the SAP's R/3 SD module.

The benchmark test, developed by SAP, measures the performance of different hardware platforms and is based on the SD module of SAP R/3, with two seconds being the maximum allowed average response time.

The record-beating client-server configuration included an AViiON 1900 quad processor with 512MB memory as the Database server, a CLARiiON disk array, and AViiON 3600 dual with 256MB memory as the R/3 Message/Enqueue server, two AV 4900 servers as Update servers, and six AV 4900 systems as Dialog servers.

The new benchmark was reached using R/3 3.0D and the Oracle 7.2 database running under Microsoft Windows NT 3.51.

The AViiON 4900 used as the database server was configured with four Pentium Pro 200 MHz processors, with 512KB cache and 512MB memory.

"This record breaking benchmark validates our choice of NT, Oracle and Data General AViiON servers as the platform for our SAP R/3 implementation," said director of IT Services at Star Enterprises, Gary Richardson. (Star Enterprise runs one of the largest US installations of SAP R/3 on Windows NT Server.)

"As our user count grows to 1200 and more, we are confident that this platform will give us excellent performance," he said.