Over the past quarter century, industry standard bodies like the TPC and SPEC have developed several standards for performance benchmarking, which have been a significant driving force behind the development of faster, less expensive, and more energy efficient systems. The two most influential database benchmark standards have been TPC-C ( industry standard for benchmarking transaction processing systems) and TPC-D and its successor TPC-H (industry standards for benchmarking decision support systems). The first TPC-C result¹was published in 1992and the first TPC-D result² was published in 1997, both by IBM. 1000+ combined publications and hundreds of research papers ever since that drove several innovations in relational database management systems.

The industry and technology landscapes have changed. IT is being extended far beyond traditional transaction processing and data warehousing to big data and analytics. Foreseeing the industry transition the TPC has developed TPC Express Benchmark HS (TPCx-HS) -industry's first (and so far the only) standard for benchmarking big data systems to provide the industry with verifiable performance, price-performance and availability metrics of hardware and software systems dealing with Big Data. This benchmark can be used to asses a broad range of system topologies and implementation of Hadoop systems in a technically rigorous and directly comparable, in a vendor-neutral manner.

It's my great pleasure to announce industry's first ever TPC Express Benchmark HS result. We published not one but three results at 1TB, 3TB and 10TB Scale Factors today demonstrating the performance and scaling of Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data:

• All results
• 5.07 HSph and$121,231.76/HSph @1TB Scale Factor, Result, ES, FDR
• 5.10 HSph and$120,518.63/HSph @3TB Scale Factor, Result, ES, FDR
• 5.77 HSph and$106,524.27/HSph @10TB Scale Factor, Result, ES, FDR

[HSph = a composite metric representing the processing power.$/HSph=price-performance]. The results were audited by TPC certified auditor.

The benchmark configuration consists of Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data  (Cisco UCS CPA v2) with two redundant active-active Cisco UCS 6296 Fabric Interconnects running Cisco UCS Manager version 2.2, 16 Cisco UCS C240 M3 Servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6.4 and MapR Distribution including Apache Hadoop.

Additional Information
Cisco UCS Performance Brief
TPC Express Benchmark HS Official Site
TPC Press Release on TPC Express Benchmark HS
Partner Blog

¹54 tpmC,$188,562/tpmC, 12/1995, IBM
²84 QthD,$52,170/QphD, IBM, 09/1992, IBM