Specifications

A Principled Technologies test report 9
The datacenter in a box performance test: Comparing Dell and HP
blade solutions
GREATER USABLE CAPACITY
More usable capacity in your server-storage solution provides more room to
grow with your business, either by giving applications more space as needed or
supporting additional blade servers using the existing storage infrastructure. This
translates directly to the total cost of ownership of your consolidated blade
server/storage deployment, or datacenter in a box. As Figure 11 shows, the Dell solution
provides 95.5 percent more usable capacity than the HP solution as configured. Each
Dell EqualLogic PS-M4110 Blade Array comes equipped with redundant controllers,
RAID technology to prevent data loss with failed drives, and redundant power supplies
that are available with the Dell M1000e blade chassis. For high availability configuration,
the redundant controllers in the Dell EqualLogic PS-M4110 arrays allow for spanning
data across the two arrays instead of the mirroring data across nodes required for high
availability by the single-controller-based HP storage arrays. This allows the Dell
datacenter in a box greater capacity, while still providing high availability at the
component level.
Figure 10. The Dell solution supported
more users per watt than the HP
solution.
1.17
0.82
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
1.2
1.4
1
Users
Users per watt
(larger numbers are better)
Dell solution
HP solution