Server Clash: DELL's Quad Opteron DELL R815 vs HP's DL380 G7 and SGI's Altix UV10

SAP S&D

The SAP S&D (Sales and Distribution, 2-tier internet configuration) benchmark is an interesting benchmark as it is a real world client-server application. We decided to look at SAP's benchmark database. The results below were all run on Windows Server 2008 EE (R2) and the MS SQL Server 2008 database (both 64-bit). Every "2-tier Sales & Distribution" benchmark was performed with SAP's latest ERP 6 enhancement package 4. These results are not comparable with any benchmark performed before 2009.

The new "2009" version of the benchmark obtains scores that are 25% lower. We analyzed the SAP Benchmark in-depth in one of our previous server oriented article. In a nutshell, SAP S&D scales well, on the condition that the processors have large caches and fast inter-cache coherency traffic.

The quad socket champion of the SAP S&D is the IBM Power System 750 server, which scores 85220 SAPS (15600 users). In the X86 world, the 130W TDP 8-core Quad Xeons rule the roost with a 20% advantage over the nearest competitor.The 95W TDP 6-core, 12 thread versions are a lot less impressive: the quad E7540 at 2GHz have a healthy but still somewhat underwhelming 30% performance advantage over the much cheaper dual socket configurations.

That does not matter too much in this kind of market: SAP software is costly to license and is even more costly to deploy and adapt to your needs. The hardware budget is a fraction of the total project budget, and as such SAP buyers are willing to pay a premium for the RAS features and top performance. This is Xeon X7560 territory.

Nevertheless, the Quad Opteron offers very competitive performance with both the Quad Xeon and dual Xeon: it is 85% faster than dual Xeons and offers 83% of the best Quad Xeons system which uses CPUs with a higher power envelope (130W versus 115W).