TEST REPORT
Initial investment payback analysis: DellMAY 2009 PowerEdge R710 solution with VMware ESX vs. HP ProLiant DL385 solution
Executive summary
Dell Inc. (Dell) commissioned Principled Technologies (PT) to estimate how many months it would take to recapture initial investment costs when consolidating multiple
•Intel® Xeon® Processor
•AMD Opteron
KEY FINDINGS
zEach Dell PowerEdge R710 solution with VMware® ESX™ can replace seven HP ProLiant DL385 solutions, and could yield a payback in under 18 months. (See Figure 1.)
zThe Dell PowerEdge R710 solution with VMware ESX delivered seven virtual servers, each of which yielded performance equivalent to or better than the performance of one physical HP ProLiant DL385 solution. (See Figure 4.)
zThe Dell PowerEdge R710 solution with VMware ESX used little more than 1/5th of the power, about 4/5 of the software costs, and 1/7th of the data center rack space of the seven HP ProLiant DL385 solutions. (See Figures 3 and 7.)
Figure 1: A single Intel Xeon Processor
Our test case modeled a typical enterprise datacenter with multiple legacy HP ProLiant DL385 solutions running
We used benchmark results from the Dell DVD Store Version 2.0 (DS2) performance benchmark to determine the number of older servers with accompanying storage that a Dell PowerEdge R710 solution could replace. To define the replacement factor, we measured the number of orders per minute (OPM) that the HP ProLiant DL385 solution could perform when running a demanding DS2 workload. We then ran DS2 in virtual machines (VMs) on the Dell PowerEdge R710 solution and measured how many VMs this newer solution could run, while obtaining