Data is the new gold. And businesses understand the value. They invest in the right IT infrastructure to run high-speed analytics on database workloads and search for trends, patterns, and correlations within their datasets. Insights from their analyses inform decisions that can lead to increased sales, more satisfied customers, and improved operations.
At the same time that IT leaders help their companies’ analysts mine data on high-performance infrastructure, they are asked to reduce costs and work toward sustainability goals. One approach is to look for cost- and energy-efficient infrastructure components.
To explore options for IT organizations, Prowess Consulting tested two NVM Express® (NVMe®) all-flash platforms and measured both storage and energy efficiency. We tested the Dell™ PowerStore™ 1200T and a second, similar storage platform from Vendor A.1 Both storage platforms guarantee a data reduction ratio (DRR) of 4:1 for block workloads.2,3
Prowess Consulting used Vdbench, an industry-standard storage benchmarking tool, to simulate a dataset with a 2:1 compression ratio and a 2:1 deduplication ratio. Using this dataset, we observed that the PowerStore 1200T demonstrated a significantly higher DRR of 4.8:1, compared to the Vendor A storage platform, which measured a DRR of 2.8:1. With higher data efficiency, the PowerStore 1200T can help enterprises reduce the number of NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs) needed for a given workload, leading to reduced infrastructure footprint and lower overall costs. Requiring fewer drives also means that less energy will be used, which can help enterprises meet their sustainability goals. In fact, in this specific testing scenario, the PowerStore 1200T used 41 percent less energy than the competitive platform.