Dell POWEREDGE M915 - Manual (Page 18)

Power Efficiency Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge M915 and HP ProLiant BL680c G7 Blade Solutions
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Industry Leading 4-Socket Server Power Efficiency
The 8-node Dell M915 blade solution in this comparison achieved an overall SPEC score of 2,425 even when
configured as it would in a typical datacenter, with redundant hard drives and all DIMM slots filled. With minor
changes to the configuration, using hardware which can be ordered standard from www.dell.com, the 8-blade
M915 solution achieved an overall SPECpower score of 2,716, which is the highest score of any 4-socket rack or
blade server published at
www.spec.org as of July, 2011 13 .
Future Platform Updates
The PowerEdge M915 blades in the Dell solution were equipped with AMD Opteron™ model 6176 processors, the
most power efficient processors available for the M915 blades at the time equipment for this study was
purchased. Likewise, the ProLiant BL680c G7 blades in the HP solution were equipped with Intel Xeon X7560
processors, the most power efficient processors available for that platform at the time equipment for the
testing was purchased. When AMD Opteron 6200-series processors are available for the Dell solution, and Intel
Xeon E7-series processors are available for the HP solution, Dell plans to update this study to show what
changes, if any, these next generation processors bring to the relative performance of the two blade solutions.
Summary
The focus of this study was to examine the overall performance and power efficiency of full-chassis solutions
utilizing the latest blades released by Dell (M915) and HP (BL680c G7). The Dell solution with eight PowerEdge
M915 blades was shown to provide 92% greater overall performance, with 87% greater power efficiency, for 21%
less cost than the HP solution, which could only accommodate four BL680c G7 blades.
An HP solution comprised of eight BL685c G7 blades could also have been used for the comparison. Given the
PowerEdge M915 blade’s 6% performance advantage over the BL685c G7 in the SPECjbb2005 benchmark
14 , the
Dell PowerEdge M915 blade solution would be expected to have an overall performance advantage in such a
comparison.
13
Based on results for the 8-node M915 as published at www.spec.org as of 15 July 2011. For more information about SPECpower, see
www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/.
14 Source: Dell PowerEdge M915 (4 chips, 48 cores, 48 threads) 1,949,160 SPECjbb2005 bops, 8 JVMs, 243,645 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM; HP ProLiant BL685c
G7 (4 chips, 48 cores, 48 threads) 1,832,929 SPECjbb2005 bops, 8 JVMs, 229,116 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM. Based on best SPECjbb2005 results published on
http://www.spec.org as of July 7, 2011. For latest SPECjbb2005 benchmark results, visit www.spec.org/osg/jbb2005.