Specifications

A Principled Technologies test report 3

Dell Active System 800 converged infrastructure solution: User

collaboration performance

alongside multiple heavy order-processing applications, all with resources left for future

expansion. This means that users can expect excellent application response on the

Active System 800, even when running heavy workloads and performing simultaneous

everyday application tasks.

Room to grow

In our tests, the two Dell PowerEdge M620 blade servers in our Dell Active System 800

configuration supported 1,000 collaboration users and two heavy order-processing workloads

using only 45 percent of processor resources

on the two servers and 3,652 storage IOPS on the

storage infrastructure, leaving room for growth and resources for additional business use. These

performance numbers show the Dell Active System 800 can scale to add new applications, users,

and content when needed.

 What does this mean for data center managers? The potential for future growth –

using available resources on existing servers – means that you can minimize

infrastructure acquisition costs, even as your business continues to grow. For example, if

you experience growth in your Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft SharePoint needs, you

can add further virtualized resources on the Active System 800 nodes on which you have

available resources. If you must grow your infrastructure to accommodate demand, you

can do so in a pre-configured, converged approach, with minimal delay and cost in

adding resources.

 What does this mean for the end user? Resource contention on back-end data center

infrastructure should never create response time or availability problems for the end-

user. Our tests show that the ability of two servers in an Active System 800 to run three

simultaneous collaboration applications and two heavy order-processing workloads

means that our 1,000 simulated users did not have to sacrifice performance or resource

availability while completing daily collaboration tasks. During our testing, the Active

System 800 achieved acceptable latencies and transactions per second.

Excellent performance even with growth

When adding workloads to your infrastructure, the performance of existing applications

should not suffer. To show that the Active System 800 could easily handle the addition of new

workloads, we added workloads to our original configuration to simulate a spike in resource

needs. We doubled the number of heavy order-processing workloads on each of our two servers

and found the 1,000 simulated users still experienced excellent performance – a latency from

Microsoft Exchange well within the published Microsoft acceptability range,

and roughly the

same Microsoft Lync Server IMs per second and Microsoft SharePoint requests per second as in

VMware vSphere core utilization measured over the test window.

50ms or lower, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998266.aspx