IBM Opens Two Enterprise Application Testing Centers

IBM has announced the opening of two new application testing centers: one in Raleigh, North Carolina, to support testing of applications running on Netfinity equipment and another in Beaverton, Oregon, to support testing of applications running on IBM/Sequent NUMA-Q architectures. Both testing centers extend IBM’s testing center program into two important enterprise areas that run on Windows NT and Windows 2000 (Win2K). Previously, IBM has set up testing centers for enterprise applications running on the AS/400, RS/6000, and S/390 platforms. At the IBM Teraplex Integration Center in Raleigh, IBM began testing enterprise partner applications this fall. The Netfinity Teraplex Integration Center features a 32-node Netfinity cluster with 8.7TB of storage that can test large-scale business intelligence applications. IBM has invested $63 million in the IBM Teraplex Integration Center. IBM invites customers into the center to stress-test hardware and software to identify and resolve scalability and functionality issues in a controlled environment before business intelligence systems go into production on large customer sites. The Teraplex Integration Center's testing also ensures that IBM business intelligence hardware and software will integrate with products that IBM business partners develop. IBM’s Netfinity line of servers running NT and Win2K have received wide industry praise for several unique features including its light path diagnostic capability, Chipkill memory, and Netfinity X-architecture. When a component on a Netfinity server fails, you can follow a light path backward to the failed component where the light path ends. IBM’s Netfinity X-architecture lets you build clustered sets of servers. For information about X-architecture, see IBM's Web site. You can also view performance benchmarks held by the Netfinity group online. IBM has announced the test results for Hyperion’s Essbase OLAP Server running IBM DB2 Universal Database on IBM Netfinity servers. IBM benchmarked the OLAP Server product for a hypothetical company of business analysts and managers accessing an 8-billion row transactional database running billions of business transactions against a 1TB database with an average subsecond (0.20) return of queries. When IBM increased the system load to 100 concurrent users, the average response time dropped down to 0.0027 second per query. Using the performance results, IBM and Essbase estimated that thousands of users can access the Essbase system successfully with good results. Essbase is in use at 2500 companies and holds the world record for the fastest performance in the APB-1 OLAP benchmark. The NUMA-Q Teraplex Integration Center opened in November 1999. The purpose of this facility is to test the largest-scale business intelligence environments for customers using IBM key technology partners. This center houses a 16-processor NUMA-Q cluster with 8 to 10TB of data storage for large-scale application testing. (NUMA-Q is capable of supporting more than 100TB of attached storage in a multi-pathed, fibre-channel Storage Area Network—SAN, and NUMA-Q systems can scale to 64 Pentium III Xeon processors in one system.) IBM extended its lead in NUMA-Q technologies last fall by acquiring Sequent. Sequent was noted for high-end multiprocessor servers with the ability to partition those processors on demand to run applications on either NT or UNIX. IBM makes both Teraplex Integration Centers freely available to its customers and business partners. Each center can test applications and products from multiple IBM divisions and from non-IBM vendors. Currently, IBM designates individual centers for each IBM platform. The S/390 and RS/6000 centers are in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the AS/400 test center is in Rochester, Minnesota. For more information about the Teraplex Integration Centers, visit IBM online.