BestPerf: Performance & Best Practices

Significance of Results

• World Record performance result with 8 processors on the two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 enhancement pack 4 (unicode) standard sales and distribution (SD) benchmark as of June 10, 2009.
• The Sun Fire X4600 M2 server with 8 AMD Opteron 8384 SE processors (32 cores, 32 threads) achieved 6,050 SAP SD Benchmark users running SAP ERP application release 6.0 enhancement pack 4 benchmark with unicode software, using MaxDB 7.8 database and Solaris 10 OS.
• This benchmark result highlights the optimal performance of SAP ERP on Sun Fire servers running the Solaris OS and the seamless multilingual support available for systems running SAP applications.
• ZFS is used in this benchmark for its database and log files.
• The Sun Fire X4600 M2 server beats both the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 and the NEC Express5800 running Windows by 10% and 35% respectively even though all three systems use the same number of processors.
• In January 2009, a new version, the Two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark, was released. This new release has higher cpu requirements and so yields from 25-50% fewer users compared to the previous Two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 (non-unicode) Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark. 10-30% of this is due to the extra overhead from the processing of the larger character strings due to Unicode encoding.  Refer to SAP Note for more details (https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1139642 Note: User and password for SAP Service Marketplace required).
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• Unicode is a computing standard that allows for the representation and manipulation of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Before the Unicode requirement, this benchmark used ASCII characters meaning each was just 1 byte. The new version of the benchmark requires Unicode characters and the Application layer (where ~90% of the cycles in this benchmark are spent) uses a new encoding, UTF-16, which uses 2 bytes to encode most characters (including all ASCII characters) and 4 bytes for some others. This requires computers to do more computation and use more bandwidth and storage for most character strings. Refer to the above SAP Note for more details.

Performance Landscape

SAP-SD 2-Tier Performance Table (in decreasing performance order).

SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) Results
(New version of the benchmark as of January 2009)

System	OS Database	Users	SAP ERP/ECC Release	SAPS	SAPS/ Proc	Date
Sun Fire X4600 M2 8xAMD Opteron 8384 SE @2.7GHz 256 GB	Solaris 10 MaxDB 7.8	6,050	2009 6.0 EP4 (Unicode)	33,230	4,154	10-Jun-09
HP ProLiant DL785 G5 8xAMD Opteron 8393 SE @3.1GHz 128 GB	Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition SQL Server 2008	5,518	2009 6.0 EP4 (Unicode)	30,180	3,772	24-Apr-09
NEC Express 5800 8xIntel Xeon X7460 @2.66GHz 256 GB	Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition SQL Server 2008	4,485	2009 6.0 EP4 (Unicode)	25,280	12,640	09-Feb-09
Sun Fire X4270 2xIntel Xeon X5570 @2.93GHz 48 GB	Solaris 10 Oracle 10g	3,700	2009 6.0 EP4 (Unicode)	20,300	10,150	30-Mar-09

SAP ERP 6.0 (non-unicode) Results
(Old version of the benchmark retired at the end of 2008)

System	OS Database	Users	SAP ERP/ECC Release	SAPS	SAPS/ Proc	Date
Sun Fire X4600 M2 8xAMD Opteron 8384 @2.7GHz 128 GB	Solaris 10 MaxDB 7.6	7,825	2005 6.0	39,270	4,909	09-Dec-08
IBM System x3650 2xIntel Xeon X5570 @2.93GHz 48 GB	Windows Server 2003 EE DB2 9.5	5,100	2005 6.0	25,530	12,765	19-Dec-08
HP ProLiant DL380 G6 2xIntel Xeon X5570 @2.93GHz 48 GB	Windows Server 2003 EE SQL Server 2005	4,995	2005 6.0	25,000	12,500	15-Dec-08

Complete benchmark results may be found at the SAP benchmark website http://www.sap.com/benchmark.

Results and Configuration Summary

Hardware Configuration:

One, Sun Fire X4600 M2
8 x 2.7 GHz AMD Opteron 8384 SE processors (8 processors / 32 cores / 32 threads)
256 GB memory
3 x STK2540, 3 x STK2501 each with 12 x 146GB/15KRPM disks

Software Configuration:

Solaris 10
SAP ECC Release: 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode)
MaxDB 7.8

Certified Results

Performance:		6050 benchmark users
SAP Certification:		2009022

Key Points and Best Practices

• This is the best 8 Processor SAP ERP 6.0 EP4 (Unicode) result as of June 10, 2009.
• Two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark on Sun Fire X4600 M2 (8 processors, 32 cores, 32 threads, 8x2.7 GHz AMD Opteron 8384 SE) was able to support 6,050 SAP SD Users on top of the Solaris 10 OS.
• Since random writes are an important part of this benchmark, we used zfs to help coalesce those into sequential writes.

Benchmark Description

The SAP Standard Application SD (Sales and Distribution) Benchmark is a two-tier ERP business test that is indicative of full business workloads of complete order processing and invoice processing, and demonstrates the ability to run both the application and database software on a single system. The SAP Standard Application SD Benchmark represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments.

SAP is one of the premier world-wide ERP application providers, and maintains a suite of benchmark tests to demonstrate the performance of competitive systems on the various SAP products.

Disclosure Statement

Two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard SAP ERP 6.0 2005/EP4 (Unicode) application benchmarks as of 06/10/09: Sun Fire X4600 M2 (8 processors, 32 cores, 32 threads) 6,050 SAP SD Users, 8x 2.7 GHz AMD Opteron 8384 SE, 256 GB memory, MaxDB 7.8, Solaris 10, Cert# 2009022. HP ProLiant DL785 G5 (8 processors, 32 cores, 32 threads) 5,518 SAP SD Users, 8x 3.1 GHz AMD Opteron 8393 SE, 128 GB memory, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, Cert# 2009009. NEC Express 5800 (8 processors, 48 cores, 48 threads) 4,485 SAP SD Users, 8x 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon X7460, 256 GB memory, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition, Cert# 2009001. Sun Fire X4270 (2 processors, 8 cores, 16 threads) 3,700 SAP SD Users, 2x 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon x5570, 48 GB memory, Oracle 10g, Solaris 10, Cert# 2009005. Sun Fire X4600M2 (8 processors, 32 cores, 32 threads) 7,825 SAP SD Users, 8x 2.7 GHz AMD Opteron 8384, 128 GB memory, MaxDB 7.6, Solaris 10, Cert# 2008070. IBM System x3650 M2 (2 Processors, 8 Cores, 16 Threads) 5,100 SAP SD users,2x 2.93 Ghz Intel Xeon X5570, DB2 9.5, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Cert# 2008079. HP ProLiant DL380 G6 (2 processors, 8 cores, 16 threads) 4,995 SAP SD Users, 2x 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon x5570, 48 GB memory, SQL Server 2005, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Cert# 2008071.

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