Dell POWEREDGE R720 - Manual (Page 4)

Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge R720 and HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Rack Servers
4
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. In this white paper, we examine the power efficiency of two rack servers in the two-processor, 2U
form factor, a form factor that is one of the most popular in many data centers because of the balance it
strikes between density and expandability.
Introduction
Dell™ commissioned its Solutions Performance Analysis team to compare the Dell PowerEdge R720 and the HP ®
ProLiant™ DL380p Gen8, both of which support the Intel ® Xeon ® processor E5-2600 product family. Using the
industry-standard SPECpower_ssj2008 ® benchmark, the two servers were tested for performance, power draw,
and performance/watt, with the hardware configured as similarly as possible to ensure an apples-to-apples
comparison.
The results showed the Dell PowerEdge™ R720 consumed less power in the tested configuration, while
delivering better raw performance and greater power efficiency.
Key findings
Performance/watt
The HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 achieved a 15% lower performance to power ratio overall than in the Dell
PowerEdge R720 in the tested configuration. At a 70% target load, the R720 had a 28% higher performance
to power ratio.
Performance
Despite drawing less power, the PowerEdge R720 provided slightly higher raw performance than the ProLiant
DL380p Gen8.
Power
In this apples-to-apples configuration, the ProLiant DL380p Gen8 consumed 7% more power at 100% target
load and 10% more power at idle compared to the PowerEdge R720.
Test methodology and detailed results are documented in this paper.
Methodology
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. Appendix
A — Test methodology details the test methodology used by Dell; Appendix B — Server hardware configuration
information and Appendix C — Server firmware and drivers provide detailed configurations for the tests; and
Appendix D — SPECpower_ssj2008 results provides detailed report data that supports the results in this paper.