Comparing Power Efficiency of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers This white paper compares the power efficiency of the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 based Dell and HP 2U rack servers Brian Bassett Solutions Performance Analysis Dell | Enterprise Solutions Group
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers This document is for informational purposes only and may contain typographical errors and technical inaccuracies. The content is provided as is, without express or implied warranties of any kind. © 2012 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell and its affiliates cannot be responsible for errors or omissions in typography or photography. Dell, the Dell logo, and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc.
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers Contents Executive summary ..................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 4 Key findings ............................................................................................................. 4 Performance/watt ..................
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers Executive summary With power and cooling costs accounting for increasingly large portions of IT budgets, IT departments looking to minimize total cost of ownership (TCO) are making power efficiency a priority when choosing server hardware.
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers Apples-to-apples configuration The two systems were configured as similarly as possible, with similar hard drive, memory, and power supply configurations. To eliminate any possible power efficiency variations between processors, tests on both systems were run using the same pair of Intel Xeon E5-2660 processors.
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers Results In this like-for-like comparison, the Dell PowerEdge R720 drew less power than the HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 at idle, at 100% target load, and at all points between, while maintaining a slight performance advantage at 100% target workload. This lead to the 15% lower performance/watt ratio for the DL380p Gen8. Figure 1: Normalized SPECpower_ssj2008 results for PowerEdge R720 and ProLiant DL380p Gen8 1.
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers SPECpower_ssj2008 includes a measurement of power while the servers are at varying levels of target utilization. The performance-to-watt ratio at each target load level is total operations (ssj_ops) divided by average power consumption of the server at that load level. Figure 2 shows power efficiency at each interval.
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers In Figure 3, the power draw of both servers at the 70% load level is shown.
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers SPECpower_ssj2008 also includes a measurement of power while the servers are at 0% target utilization (Active Idle). The ProLiant DL380p Gen8 drew 17.5W (10%) more than the PowerEdge R720 when both systems were idle. Figure 4: Power utilization at active idle4 SPECpower results Power utilization at 0% target load (active idle) in watts (lower is better) 110 105 105 100 95 90 87.
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers Summary The results of the SPECpower_ssj2008 testing show similar performance between the two systems, with the Dell PowerEdge R720 having a 1% advantage in raw performance over the HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8. However, the ProLiant DL380p Gen8 has 15% lower power efficiency overall, and 28% lower power efficiency at the important 70% load level.
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers Appendix A — Test methodology SPECpower_ssj2008 standard SPECpower_ssj2008 is an industry standard benchmark created by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) to measure a server’s power and performance across multiple utilization levels. SPECpower_ssj2008 consists of a Server Side Java (SSJ) workload along with data collection and control services.
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers CPU Power Management set to DAPC Memory Frequency set to Maximum Performance Intel Turbo Boost Enabled C1E Enabled C States Enabled Memory Patrol Scrub set to Disabled.
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers The following JVM options were used on both servers, as they are the best-known JVM tunings for SPECpower_ssj2008 for the IBM J9 JVM: -Xms1024m -Xmx1024m-Xmn853m -Xaggressive -Xcompressedrefs -XlockReservation -Xnoloa -XtlhPrefetch -Xlp -Xgcpolicy:gencon The following bindings were used to ensure that each of the sixteen JVMs ran on 2 logical processors: start /affinity [3, C, 30, C0, 300, C00, 3000, C000, 30000,
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers Appendix B — Server hardware configuration information Table 2: Server hardware configuration information Server hardware PowerEdge R720 Proliant DL380p Gen8 32 32 Samsung Samsung 2Rx8 PC3L-10600R 2Rx8 PC3L-10600R Speed (MHz) 1333 1333 Timing/latency CAS 9 CAS 9 4 x 8 GB 4 x 8 GB Memory modules Total RAM in system (GB) Vendor Type Number of RAM modules Hard disk Number of disks in system 2 2
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers Appendix C — Server firmware and drivers Table 3: Server firmware and drivers Driver/firmware versions PowerEdge R720 Proliant DL380p Gen8 1.1.2 2012.02.25 11.14.44 7.0.6.0 HBA firmware 21.0.2-0001 2.14 HBA drivers 5.1.112.64 6.22.0.64 Video driver 2.4.1.0 6.12.1.1020 Integrated management controller firmware 1.06.06 1.05 N/A 3.5.0.
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers Appendix D — SPECpower_ssj2008 results Figure 5: SPECpower_ssj2008 results for PowerEdge R720 16
Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers Figure 6: SPECpower_ssj2008 results for ProLiant DL380p Gen8 17
