The system using the Dual-Core Itanium 2 processors from Intel has demonstrated the highest performance of any 16-processor server, and the lowest price/performance ratio of a non-clustered server in the 3 000GB TPC-H benchmark, says Bernard Donnelly, consulting services manager at Unisys Africa. TPC-H is widely recognised as a standard measure of system performance for decision support and BI in commercial business computing.

In performance figures reported by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), the 16-way ES7000/one achieved an improvement in price/performance of 50% compared to a competitor's similarly performing platform running the previous generation of Intel Itanium 2 processors. Both systems achieved just over 30 000 queries per hour, Donnelly says. It cost $37,83 per query, per hour to achieve it on the Unisys system and $75,16 on the other system, he adds.

It means that our servers are scalable, optimise IT asset utilisation and reduce the total cost of ownership, says Donnelly.

Combining the power of the Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 platform with Unisys expertise in mission-critical enterprise computing, the ES7000/one provides an alternative to proprietary Unix and Risc systems, as well as an engine for high-performance transaction applications and sophisticated BI deployments, says Kirk Skaugen, vice-president of the Digital Enterprise Group at Intel.

The Unisys ES7000/one is designed to permit configuration of a single platform for both Intel Itanium 2 and Intel Xeon processors, and to enable customers to standardise and consolidate management and maintenance requirements while reducing their cost of ownership.