Ho-hum, more benchmarks.
".....The only plausible explanation for Big Blue not running the SD test on a fully loaded 32-socket, 256-core Power 795...." Well, I can think of several equally plausible reasons - maybe IBM is seeig most sales activity in this size of SAP implementation; or maybe it's just a sweet spot cost-wise for the AIX but doesn't necessarily mean it can't scale; or maybe they ran out of space for the racks and racks of short-stroked storage that IBM would have need for an even larger implementation.
".....That's about twice the performance of IBM's prior generation Power 595 machine...." Seeing as my experience is the old Power6 systems weren't (usually) CPU bound but eventually ran out of steam due to the memory space available and the bandwidth to storage, I'm tempted to ask if they couldn't have made the old P595 go faster with mroe memory and the same storage setup as used with the new Power7 P795 benchmark?
"....and it costs a lot less money than either an Oracle/Fujitsu Sparc Enterprise M9000 or an IBM Power 780 or 795...." Welcome to Understatement City! However, if you want to compare traditional UNIX servers to clustered Wintel then you have to factor in the additional costs of system administration (more servers = more work), added networking and SAN requirements, and then the fun of building DR into your Wintel cluster. I have also yet to see a high-end UNIX solution from any of the vendors mentioned go in for anything near list price, so expect heavy discounting that might not be matched by thinner-margin Wintel.
I'm also curious as to how performance would compare for the Wintel solutions against Lintel ones using RedHat or SuSE, and do Oracle not want to talk about Oracle Linux now that they want to make some Slowaris licence money?
And finally, the usually caveats buried away in the vendor small print - a carefully crafted benchmark done in a controlled environemnt has just about zero rellevance to real World use, so insist the vendor PROVES that the kit can do what you want in your environment, with your OS and app stack, your SAN and LAN. If this wasn't the case then none of the vendors would have so many disclaimers in all their benchmark press releases.