Prowess Consulting put these servers to the test to determine how well they would perform as hosts for the database and virtual machine (VM) workloads typically found in small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
When it comes to server infrastructure, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have unique needs. They often need systems that can be jacks of all trades to handle all of their compute needs, from general business apps and services to database workloads to virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs). While these servers need performance and reliability to handle these tasks, they don’t need the extreme performance and headroom required by some enterprise workloads. SMB servers need to be efficient and reliable, and they need to fit into typically constrained footprints in the IT facility.
Prowess Consulting research and testing determined that Dell™ PowerEdge™ R450 and Dell PowerEdge R550 servers are well suited to meet these needs. The PowerEdge R550 server bested its PowerEdge R540 predecessor by up to 2.21x in HammerDB TPROC-C database benchmark testing. Similarly, the PowerEdge R450 server outperformed an earlier-generation PowerEdge R440 server by up to 1.46x.
Our testing also showed exceptional virtual machine (VM) capabilities for the two systems. The PowerEdge R550 server spun up 1.5x more VMs than the previous-generation PowerEdge R540 server. The PowerEdge R450 server was able to spin up 1.33x more VMs at 100 percent utilization than the earlier-model PowerEdge R440 server.