Industry Performance Benchmarks for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Products

There are many factors to consider when using benchmarks to compare vendors' products. Most important is to examine results from benchmarks that are a reasonable match for the application and system size that you are considering. A multi-million dollar, multi-terabyte database benchmark result may not hold a lot of relevance to you if you are planning to deploy a small application server. Benchmarks fall into a number of categories, including:

• Performance focused. These benchmarks aim for the highest performance regardless of system cost.
• Price/performance focused. These benchmarks aim for the lowest cost regardless of the system performance.

In many cases, as with any purchase, a reasonable mix of price and performance is the most suitable choice for a real-world system. The fastest performer may be unreasonably expensive, while the cheapest system may be unreasonably slow. Other important criteria include:

• System architecture. 32-bit or 64-bit. x86, Itanium, POWER, etc
• System size. The number of CPUs in the system under test
• System configuration. Multiple clustered systems, or a single non-clustered system. Benchmarks for multi-tier applications may use different architectures and operating systems for different tiers.
• Database size. Range from 100GB to many terabytes
• Services. Some benchmarks include the cost of 24x7 support, others do not factor support costs into the final result

When researching benchmark results the following sites provide a good starting point:

• www.tpc.org - TPC-C and TPC-H are database benchmarks that measure transaction processing and decision support performance
• www.spec.org - A suite of benchmarks covering a wide range of applications, including web serving, file serving, and compute power
• www.oracle.com/benchmark - Dedicated to measuring Oracle application performance on various systems
• www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark - Dedicated to measuring SAP application performance on various systems

Benchmark tests require a carefully tuned combination of hardware, operating system and test application, so Red Hat does benchmarks in collaboration with its partners. Red Hat benchmark partners include: