Dell benchmarks cluster

Dell last week released performance benchmarks for its PowerEdge servers, claiming that they have the best combination of performance, value and availability for a cluster of data center servers.

The company benchmarked the servers using Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2003 benchmark, for which it ran Windows Exchange Server 2003 on a cluster of four PowerEdge 1750 dual-processor 3.2-GHz Xeon servers connected via a switch to a Dell/EMC CX600 storage-area network (SAN). The servers had hyper-threading enabled, allowing them to handle more than one task at once.

While benchmarks have always been popular in the Unix server world, it is just in the last two years that server vendors have performed TPC-C and other benchmarks on Intel servers running Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or IBM DB2.

Dell used Microsoft-developed benchmarks that are published at:

https://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/performance

Specifically, Dell used MAPI Messaging Benchmark 3, which measures a server’s messaging performance using Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and approximates how many typical corporate e-mail users the server can support. Dell’s score for the cluster was 15,000. An operating environment with higher MMB3 results than another is able to hold more users per server, although the exact number is not the MMB3 score.

In July Dell’s 1850 was benchmarked and performed at 6,500 MMB3s. Fujitsu’s Primergy BX600, a dual-processor Xeon-based server, achieved 6,664 MMB3s. HP in March benchmarked its ProLiant ML350 G3 at 4,500 MMB3s.