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To: GVTucker who wrote (176606)	1/21/2004 10:56:11 AM
From: The Duke of URL©	Respond to of 186894

January 21, 2004 07:30 AM US Eastern Timezone Insurer UICI's Purchase of Nine Unisys ES7000 Servers Speaks Volumes About the Economics of Standardization BLUE BELL, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 21, 2004-- UICI's independent testing shows the ES7000 with Intel(r) Itanium 2(r) processors achieves a four-fold performance improvement; TPC-C benchmark also sets new performance record Numbers speak louder than words for power users of enterprise server technology like UICI, a provider of insurance and other financial services. UICI purchased nine ES7000 servers, powered by Intel(r) Itanium 2(r) processors with the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) database, from Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) to run its information infrastructure for insurance policies and claims. UICI's own tests demonstrated that the Unisys ES7000 completed tasks nearly four times faster than was previously possible on its commodity servers. UICI, based in North Richland Hills, Texas, provides life and health insurance and related financial services. The Self-Employed Division of UICI has delivered health insurance for the past 23 years to self-employed individuals across the United States. UICI will consolidate most of its current farm of more than 40 commodity servers onto eight Unisys ES7000s, and it will use a ninth ES7000 to develop and test solutions for future database initiatives, as well as to take advantage of opportunities to migrate from UNIX/RISC and mainframe environments. "Our SQL Server database is the core of our imaging workflow, EAI (enterprise application integration), and telephony/IVR (interactive voice response) environments, and we were rapidly outgrowing the scalability limitations of our existing environment," said Glen Whitling, manager of database administration, UICI. "Careful analysis and collaboration with Unisys, along with our own benchmark results, convinced us that the time is right to standardize on an Intel 64-bit platform with Windows Server 2003 for better scalability, performance and reliability at a lower cost." UICI's findings point to a dramatic reduction in the cost and complexity of handling the large volumes of online transactions that are the lifeblood of today's global organizations. Evidence such as the TPC-C benchmark results announced today further confirms the performance and economic benefits of Unisys, Intel and Windows-based systems over UNIX-based systems. The TPC-C benchmark, the computer industry's standard measure of server performance and economy, shows that an ES7000 achieved the best performance of any 16-processor server ever tested with the methodology. The performance level achieved in the benchmark is relevant to realistic workload requirements, such as those of UICI. At less than $5 per transaction (tpmC), the server also scored the best price/performance of any server with more than four processors. "UICI's selection of the ES7000 is further evidence of the trend for IT managers to consolidate and standardize large-scale enterprise data centers," said Tom Manter, database server program director, Unisys. "In addition to strong performance, companies realize a substantial cost savings in both hardware and management resources. Increasingly, Microsoft, Intel and Unisys are achieving unheard-of price/performance results that companies like UICI are taking advantage of to get more and more out of their information investments." The 16-way Unisys ES7000 Aries 420 Enterprise Server used for the TPC-C benchmark recorded 309,036.53 transactions per minute (tpmC) at $4.49 per tpmC. The server was equipped with 16 Intel Itanium 2 processors running at 1.5 GHz, each with 6 MB of Level 3 (iL3) cache and 128 GB of memory. It was running the Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition (64-bit) database and the Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition 64-bit for Itanium-Based Systems operating system. The complete benchmark configuration will be available January 30, 2004. The hardware and operating system are available now. "This sort of data highlights how Itanium 2, on a scalable multiprocessor platform like the Unisys ES7000, is transforming the economics of the data center," said Lisa Graff, director, Itanium Group, Intel Corporation. "To understand the significance of this achievement, take a look at benchmark results from just a couple of years ago. You'd see half the performance for five, six, seven times the price at the top of the list of TPC-C benchmark leaders. It's amazing how far performance and price/performance have advanced." For more information about the TPC-C benchmark, visit www.tpc.org.

To: GVTucker who wrote (176606)	1/21/2004 1:03:35 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

GV, regarding CA wages Yes I knew when I wrote that, that somebody would say 55K was a huge salary for a NCG. But you have to keep in mind it costs $1500/mo for a 1 BR apartment here. This is the highest cost of living in the country (still) I believe, so wages are indeed higher. I know that when I first started at Oracle, over 10 years ago and during the last recession- no bubble etc.- top university graduate students were getting about 50K here, THEN. So other wages have gone up, executive salaries have certainly gone up, pretty much everything is more now than then..... except engineering salaries. Consequently there is a "shortage".