Running applications like analytics, AI, or real-time transaction processing on a server at speed requires high-performance storage. At the same time, high availability is a key requirement.
RAID can be a powerful tool for ensuring the availability of local storage because it combines multiple physical disk drives into a single virtual disk for data redundancy, performance improvement, or a combination of both. The Dell™ PowerEdge RAID Controller 12 (PERC 12) and PERC 11 offer native NVM Express® (NVMe®) RAID support, unlocking the ability to directly harness RAID’s benefits for high-performance NVMe storage.
To help organizations evaluate the performance benefits of running data-intensive workloads on servers with NVMe RAID and to assess the benefits of upgrading to PERC 12 from PERC 11, Prowess Consulting tested a Dell™ PowerEdge™ R760 server with both PERC 12 and PERC 11. Our testing found that using PERC 12 instead of PERC 11 allowed us to improve storage performance more than 10x and increase storage throughput almost 5x, compared to PERC 11. Additionally, with PERC 12, RAID 5 rebuilds were up to 110% faster, RAID 10 rebuilds were up to 56% faster, and Microsoft® SQL Server® database restores were up to 90% faster.