Boosting Performance with the PowerEdge R740 and 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
Driving workloads faster is paramount for IT organizations tasked with supporting the success of their businesses. Exponentially-growing databases driven by rapidly expanding numbers of external customers and internal users, all of whom expect faster and faster response times, makes it incumbent upon IT DM’s/org’s to periodically refresh their infrastructures with new resources capable of meeting workload requirements and user demands.
In this light, we were interested in evaluating the performance of one of our most popular server models, the 2-socket PowerEdge R740 rack server,
configured with the latest 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. The R740 is a general-purpose server with configuration flexibility allowing it to be tailored to specific requirements for demanding workloads including data analytics, web tech, VDI, cloud applications, HPC and OLTP.
We chose OLTP as the environment to test, and in particular chose the OLTP workload from the Hammer DB suite of benchmarks. This benchmark reports results in two metrics — Transactions Per Minute (TPM) and New Orders Per Minute (NOPM), both of which give an indication of the ability of the server to accomplish heavy workloads. The database selected for these tests was Oracle.
In selecting the server to which the R740 would be compared, we wanted the base point to reflect what users might already have installed. In other words, we wanted to be able to provide users with insight along the lines of, “compared to your installed server, the R740 with 2nd Generation Xeon Scalable Processors can give you X% greater performance.” Of all the server models installed out there in IT infrastructures worldwide, we chose the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen 9 configured with previous-generation Intel Xeon processors.
Since we were comparing to a non-Dell EMC server, and we wanted to ensure that the comparison would be valid, neutral and fair, we chose an outside vendor to do the testing.
