The journey of building a small to medium-sized business can bring plenty of potential rewards—along with opportunities to make costly mistakes. Many decision makers who've wisely navigated fork-in-the-road challenges can look back on key decisions that served as cornerstones for their success—such as smart investments in IT infrastructure. For organizations that rely on time-tested legacy servers to handle daily workloads like data analysis and web hosting, it can be tempting to stick with familiar hardware—even in the face of evolving markets and increasing demand. But older equipment can hinder future growth. The decision to refresh aging hardware with newer models can equip businesses with advantages that can pay off for years to come—like faster data analysis, the capacity to host more web traffic, and the opportunity to save money and streamline operations through server consolidation.
We compared the performance of a multipurpose server cluster of three legacy Dell PowerEdge R740xd servers with 16-core Intel Xeon Gold 6130 processors to two different configurations of a cluster of three new Dell PowerEdge R7715 servers powered by 32-core AMD EPYC 9355 processors. We ran 9 SQL Server VMs on the first R7715 configuration and 15 SQL Server VMs on the second R7715 configuration. On each of the three cluster setups, we ran simultaneous data analysis and web server workloads—two performance categories that reflect the priorities of many small and medium businesses that host their websites and seek to leverage the potential value of analyzing their data.
We found that both of the PowerEdge R7715 configurations offered superior data analysis performance compared to the legacy servers—while also supporting more web server transactions. The performance differences were large enough that a business that chooses to upgrade their legacy R740xd servers to newer R7715s could potentially replace up to five older systems with one new server. In addition to the benefits of improved data analytics performance and the ability to host more visitors on their website, businesses that consolidate with new servers could also save money by lowering ongoing licensing, maintenance, management, power, and cooling costs.
To find out more about the potential benefits of upgrading to latest-generation PowerEdge R7715 servers, check out the report and infographic below.
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