Data centers and the servers in them act as the operational engines of many organizations, driving modern technological wonders like lightning-fast app response times, seamless transactions, and nearly instantaneous information at our fingertips. Like a well-tuned engine, a right-sized data center can strike a valuable balance between efficiency (e.g., data center energy and licensing costs) and available power to meet demand (e.g., performance and scalability). And larger organizations aren't the only ones who can reap these benefits. For operators of small- to medium-sized data centers—who may face limited rack space and tighter budgets—workload consolidation through server upgrades can provide the performance boost they need to stay on the growth track while ultimately saving money on power and licensing costs.
To demonstrate the possible performance and cost-savings benefits of workload consolidation through server upgrades, we captured online transactional processing (OLTP) performance and energy consumption metrics for both a current-gen Dell PowerEdge C6615 node with a 32-core AMD EPYC 8324P processor and a legacy Supermicro server with two 16-core Intel Xeon Scalable processors. We found that the Dell and AMD solution handled 29.9 percent more OLTP transactions than the legacy solution—while using 25.6 percent less power. Those results translate to 74.7 percent more performance per watt, indicating that upgrades and consolidation could lead to a significant boost to data center power and efficiency.
There are other potential cost savings to consider with consolidation. When we extrapolated our test results, we found that four of the Dell nodes would likely be able to handle the OLTP work of five legacy servers while using 48.2 percent less power. The potential energy cost savings are clear, but organizations in that scenario could also save additional money on licensing fees with a 20.0 percent reduction in the number of VMware licenses they’d need to buy.
Our results show that consolidating the workloads of older servers onto newer ones offers many potential benefits, such as performance boosts and savings on power and licensing costs. For organizations looking to tune their data centers for efficiency and future growth, server consolidation could be a very useful tactic.
To read more about the potential benefits of server consolidation with Dell PowerEdge C6615 servers, check out the report and infographic below.
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