Specifications

A Principled Technologies test report 2
Dell Active System 800 converged infrastructure solution: User
collaboration performance
FLEXIBLE CONVERGENCE WITH POWER
Deploying a successful and efficient blade infrastructure can be a daunting task. That’s
why Dell created the Dell Active System 800 converged infrastructure solution – a tested,
complete solution that can provide you with the performance you need to support your
workloads today and scale to meet your future needs. The Dell Active System 800 solution is
preconfigured with eight to thirty-two Dell PowerEdge M620 blade servers, one or two Dell
PowerEdge M1000e blade enclosures, Dell EqualLogic™ storage arrays, Dell Force10™ switches,
and two PowerEdge M I/O aggregators. For organizations that require performance on a larger
scale, the Active System 800 scales beyond this base configuration to accommodate a larger
number of server nodes and storage arrays. For more information about the solution we tested,
see Appendix A.
Enterprise-class power for collaboration users
In our tests, two Dell PowerEdge M620 blades of our Dell Active System 800
configuration supported 1,000 collaboration users (Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft
SharePoint® Server 2010, and Microsoft Lync® Server 2010), and two heavy Microsoft SQL
Server® 2012 order-processing workloads. See Appendix K for more details on the specifics of
each test.
Figure 1 provides detailed information on our tests and the results from each
benchmark.
Workload
Measurement
Order-processing workload
65,579 orders per minute
Microsoft Exchange
6.585ms latency (<50ms is acceptable)
1.685 messages per second
Microsoft SharePoint
8.040 requests per second
Microsoft Lync Server
8.304 IMs per second
Figure 1. Baseline results from our testing of Microsoft collaboration and database workloads.
 What does this mean for data center managers? The fact that 1,000 users and two very
heavy order-processing workloads ran on just two of the blade servers in an Active
System 800 solution means that there is great potential for server consolidation and
convergence – many users can be supported on far fewer servers. With the ability to
converge many applications and users on fewer servers, network fabrics, and storage
arrays, data center management costs will be reduced. Platform scalability allows for
vast expansion for greater numbers of users and applications – the Active System 800
supports up to 32 blade servers and multiple storage arrays.
 What does this mean for the end user? Our tests show that 1,000 simulated users
concurrently used three collaboration applications with excellent response times