Specifications

A Principled Technologies test report 6

The datacenter in a box performance test: Comparing Dell and HP

blade solutions

Database testing

To create our real-world ecommerce workload, we used the DVD Store Version

2.1 benchmarking tool. DS2 models an online DVD store, where customers log in, search

for movies, and make purchases. DS2 reports these actions in orders per minute that

the system could handle, to show what kind of performance you could expect for your

customers. The DS2 workload also performs other actions, such as adding new

customers, to exercise the wide range of database functions you would need to run your

ecommerce environment.

We ran DS2 with 32 threads on both solutions, with a 0.12-second think time on

the Dell solution and a 0.18-second think time on the HP solution. This allowed us to

simulate a user completing one order approximately every 15 seconds on both

solutions, within the read latency requirements.

For more details about the DS2 tool, see

http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/DVD+Store.

Mail testing

To test the solutions’ mail server performance, we used the Microsoft Load

Generator 2010 (LoadGen) benchmark, performing tasks to simulate a heavy user

generating mail activity. For our workloads, we used the following settings:

 Mailbox Profile: 250MB mailboxes

 Action Profile: Very heavy

 Client Type: Outlook_500

For more details about LoadGen, see

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDEC1642-F6E3-4D66-

A82F-8D3062C6FA98&displaylang=en.

Figure 5. The Dell datacenter in a box

supported as many as 50.0 percent