One of the long term objectives of all the big IT systems vendors is to find the next `big thing

Is the benchmark for benchmarks that they are no longer worth attempting? The question arises because far less action or brouhaha has occurred in the world of the new TPC-E benchmark than might have been expected. Both Dell and IBM have recently joined Unisys in publishing first results but, strangely, neither has made much fuss about them.

Back in July Unisys became the first server vendor to announce results against the new tests. These set out to simulate the online transaction processing workload of a brokerage firm. This is aimed at giving a much more relevant impression of how a server and database combination will perform in the real world than the old TPC-C benchmark, which while not discredited, has ended up fairly tarnished by rumours and innuendoes about the ways databases and hardware could `tuned

At the back end of last year Sun Microsystems came up with Project Blackbox, a good marketing wheeze in the form of a `datacentre in a box