Server Clash: DELL's Quad Opteron DELL R815 vs HP's DL380 G7 and SGI's Altix UV10
by Johan De Gelas on September 9, 2010 7:30 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- AMD
- Intel
- Xeon
- Opteron
Putting It All Together
Finally, we have been able to offer you a comparison of real OEM servers. In this article, we tried some new approaches with our testing methods: we measured and compared response times and energy consumption, instead of the usual focus on "throughput" and "maximum/idle power". It is important to take a step back and look at all our benchmark data from the point of view of a server buyer.
Let's start with the quad Xeon 7500 server: the SGI Altix UV 10 or QSSC-4R. Based on our performance numbers alone, we felt that one quad Xeon 7500 server could replace two or more dual Xeon servers as the performance/price was right. The price is about 2.5x higher than a dual Xeon, but you get twice the performance, more expandibility (PCIe and DIMM slots), and superior RAS as bonus. Remember, a Xeon MP with a price/performance ratio that could rival that of a dual Xeon was a first.
But the appearance of the Dell R815 and the high energy consumption make the SGI / QSSC server retreat to its typical target (and very profitable) markets: ERP, databases with large memory footprints where RAS is not a bonus but the top priority. The performance was a pleasant surprise and the power consumption of CPUs was decent. Make sure you populate at least 32 DIMMs, as bandwidth takes a dive at lower DIMM counts.
The power consumption of the platform, especially looking at the idle numbers, remains a weak spot. We know that scalability and availability come with a price, but three times higher energy consumption than a dual socket server is too much to convince us that the quad Xeon platform is an attractive virtualization building block.
The HP Proliant DL380 G7 surprised with better than expected energy consumption and some really clever engineering (CPU cage, cold redundancy, energy management...). The high single threaded performance of the Xeon X5670 leads to low response times in many real world circumstances. At high loads, it is outperformed by the Dell R815 that is hardly more expensive.
With 80% higher DIMM counts and 80% to 85% higher throughput, the Dell PowerEdge R815 surpasses the rival HP DL380 G7 by a large margin, while at the same time costing only 20-30% more and needing just as much rack space. That is amazing value. While the price/performance ratio blew us away, we were also hoping that a single R815 could beat the performance/watt ratio of two HP DL380 G7s by a significant margin. That would have been the cherry on the cake, but it did not happen.
The server is not too blame; rather, the CPUs consume more than the ACP ratings that AMD mentions everywhere. The truth is that the CPUs at high load consume much closer to their TDP numbers than ACP ones. However, the performance per watt ratio of the complete server is still competitive. The lower single-thread performance per core is a disadvantage in applications with complex webpages. We would avoid the low end Opteron 6100s.
The bottom line is that Dell's R815 can replace two HP DL380 G7s at a much lower investment cost, with about the same energy costs and lower management costs. Having to manage half as much physical servers should after all also lower the operation costs. Dell's PowerEdge R815 materializes AMD's promise of the "Value 4P server".
My special thanks goes out to Tijl Deneut for his benchmarking assistance.
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JohanAnandtech - Friday, September 10, 2010 - link
Thanks, appreciate you took the time to let us know. We went through 5 weeks of intensive testing and my eyes still hurt from looking at the countless excel sheets, with endless power and response time readings. ;-)FourthLiver - Thursday, September 9, 2010 - link
at the end of page 12, you allude to a performance per watt analysis. looks like you forgot to put it up. i'm chomping at the bit to see those numbers!please disregard me if i failed to rtfa correctly. Anandtech is the best; your (all of you collectively) articles are brilliant and correct down to the smallest details. This is another article that was an absolute joy to read. :]
JohanAnandtech - Thursday, September 9, 2010 - link
Well you can't really calculate it, as it depends on the situation. On low load loads, the system that consumes the less, is the winner, on the condition that the response times stay low. But of course, if your systems are running at low load all time, there might be something wrong: you should have bought more RAM and consolidated more VMs per system.At higher loads, the power consumption at high load divided by the throughput (vApusmark) is close to the truth. But it is definitely not the performance/watt number for everyone
It depends on your workloads. The more critical processing power (think response time SLA) is, the more the last mentioned calculation makes sense. The more we are talking about lots of lightly loaded VMs (like authentification servers, fileservers etc.), the more simply looking at the energy consumed at page 12 make sense.
mino - Thursday, September 9, 2010 - link
First, congratulations to a great article !Now to the small ammount of mess in there:
"the CPUs consume more than the ACP ratings that AMD mentions everywhere"
1) Avegare CPU Power (ACP) is NOT supposed/marketed to represent 100% load power use
Wikipedia: "The average CPU power (ACP), is a scheme to characterize power consumption of new central processing units under "average" daily usage..."
2) 122W at the wall and 110W at the CPU ??? Are you telling us the PSU's are 95% along with VRM/power/fans at 95% efficiency ? (0.95*0.95*1.22=1.10)
. Sorry to spoil the party but that is NOT the case. 122W at wall means 100W at CPU at the most realistically 95W.
Otherwise a great work. Keep is up!
JohanAnandtech - Friday, September 10, 2010 - link
"1) Avegare CPU Power (ACP) is NOT supposed/marketed to represent 100% load power useWikipedia: "The average CPU power (ACP), is a scheme to characterize power consumption of new central processing units under "average" daily usage...""
You are right. But what value does it have? As an admin I want to know what the maximum could be realistically (TDP is the absolute maximum for non-micro periods) and if you read between the lines that is more or less what AMD communicated (see their white paper). if it is purely "average", it has no meaning, because average power can be a quite a bit lower as some servers will run at 30% on average, others at 60%.
These PSU are supposed to be 92-94% efficient and AFAIK the VRMs are at least 90% efficient. So 122 x 0.92 x 0.90 = 101 W.
mino - Saturday, September 11, 2010 - link
Well, I was bit unslept when writing it but anyway. So got a bit harser than should have.In my experience the ACP values pretty well represent your average loaded server (<= 80% load). But that is not the point.
AMD created ACP in a response to the fact that their TDP numbers are conservative while Intel's are optimistic. That was the main cause wery well known to you as well.
Call me an ass but I certainly do not remember AT bitching about Intel TDPs no bein representative (during last 6 years at least).
And we all know too well that those NEVER represented the real power use of their boxen nor did they EVER represented what the "TDP" moniker stands for.
Currently the situation is as such that identical 2P AMD box with 80W ACP has ~ the same power requirements as 2P Intel box with 80W TDP. You have just proven that.
Therefore I believe it would be fair to stop bitching about AMD (or Intel) cheating in marketing (both do) and just say whether the numbers are comparable or not.
Arguing about spin wattage is not really needed.
JohanAnandtech - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
"Arguing about spin wattage is not really needed. "I have to disagree. The usual slogan is "don't look at TDP, look at measurements". What measurments? The totally unrealistic SPECpower numbers?
It is impossible for review sites to test all CPUs. So it is up to vendors to gives us a number that does not have to be accurate on a few percent, but that let us select CPUs quickly.
Customers should have one number that allows them to calculate worst case numbers which are realistic (heavily load webserver for example, not a thermal virus). So all CPU vendors should agree on a standard. That is not bitching, but is a real need of the sysadmins out there.
mino - Thursday, September 9, 2010 - link
One thing I would love to see is having the lowest end HP server put to its paces.So far it seems to us a the best option for vCenter hosting in small environments (with FT Vm's hosting vCenter).
Maybe even run 1-tile vAPUS (v1? perhaps) on it ?
m3rdpwr - Thursday, September 9, 2010 - link
I would have prepared to have had the DL385 G7 compared.They can be had with 8 and 12 core CPU's.
We have close to 200 HP servers of all models, rack and blades.
Many running vm in our Data Center.
-Mario
duploxxx - Friday, September 10, 2010 - link
same here, we moved also to 385g7 with the new 8-12core cpu's, Nice servers with huge core count since we never run more vCPU then pCPU in a system. Dell 815 looks like a good solution also, it was mentioned in the review the BL685 and DL585 are way more expensive.