IBM has announced that WebSphere Application Server, a key building block for services oriented architecture (SOA), shattered a popular industry benchmark for scalability and performance by more than 33 percent using technology that costs half the price of the competition.

Businesses rely on application servers to build, run, integrate and manage hundreds or even thousands of software applications. This makes high performance and scalability of these application servers critical to the success of a company's SOA strategy. IBM delivered more than 50 million business transactions per hour, beating the previous mark held by Oracle in The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.'s (SPEC) SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark, an independent, industry-standard benchmark that measures the scalability and performance of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application servers.

"This benchmark delivers an unprecedented, high level of performance in a real-world customer environment," said Tom Rosamilia, general manager, IBM Application and Integration Middleware. "IBM has more than 100,000 WebSphere Application Server customers worldwide and these results confirm why IBM middleware is consistently chosen to power some of the world's largest and most demanding applications. WebSphere Application Server provides the SOA infrastructure to meet customer needs today and for the future."

IBM currently leads the industry in all of the categories of SPECjAppServer2004. The total throughput test shows how well the application server scales up as hardware is added; and per processor-core throughput is an excellent measure of price-performance and application server efficiency. These benchmark results show that IBM is developing software that gives customers the highest level of performance, no matter what hardware the customer is running. With WebSphere Application Server as the foundation of SOA, customers have a secure deployment environment that can scale and perform at the levels needed for their mission critical applications, the company says.

The Power Behind SOA

As the worldwide leader in middleware, IBM is in a strong position to capitalize on the estimated $160 billion SOA market. With more than 700 patents since its initial deployment in 1998, WebSphere Application Server supports an unparalleled range of platforms and can be deployed on servers of any size, providing the flexible application infrastructure companies need for SOA.

WebSphere is the SOA runtime platform. There are more than 9,000 independent software vendors writing applications on top of WebSphere, providing a broad choice of options for customers. In addition, IBM continues to build its community of two million WebSphere developers by providing them with the tools and resources to work on a broad range of platforms based on open standards. This benchmark also illustrates IBM's JAVA application server leadership and its continuing commitment to open standards.

Benchmark Details

The full configuration included: IBM WebSphere Application Server v6.1 plus the EJB3 Feature Pack running on IBM POWER6 BladeCenter servers powered by two dual-core IBM POWER6 4.0 GHz processors and IBM DB2 Universal Database v9.5 on a System p p595 running AIX. IBM WebSphere Application Server established record-breaking SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark performance and scalability results. The benchmark involved more than 109,850 concurrent clients and produced 14,004.42 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard (jAppServer Operations Per Second), which translates into more than 50 million business transactions over the course of the benchmark's hour-long runtime.

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.'s (SPEC) SPECj 2004 benchmark reflects the rigors of complex applications and high-volume transaction processing that are typical in today's customer environments. The test spans all major components of the application server including Web serving, Enterprise Java Beans, and messaging, and includes hardware, application server software, Java Virtual Machine software, database software, and a systems network. The test was jointly developed by companies including IBM, BEA, Sun, Oracle and Borland as a way to highlight the features, quality and performance of their products.

The entire WebSphere portfolio will be featured at IMPACT 2008 in Las Vegas on April 6-10, 2008. To learn more about IBM's record-breaking results, visit SPEC.