System information

A Principled Technologies test report 9
Comparing performance and cost: Dell PowerEdge VRTX vs.
legacy hardware solution
Mail testing
To test the solutions’ mail server performance, we used the Microsoft® Load
Generator 2010 (LoadGen) benchmark, performing tasks to simulate a heavy user
generating mail activity. For our workloads, we used the following settings:
 Number of users: 500
 Mailbox Profile: 250MB mailboxes
 Action Profile: Outlook_200
For more details about LoadGen, see
www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDEC1642-F6E3-4D66-A82F-
8D3062C6FA98&displaylang=en.
File and print testing
To test the file and print capabilities of the solutions, we simulated workloads
using the Iometer benchmark. Iometer measures IOPS on single and clustered systems.
Iometer performs I/O operations to stress a system, and then records the performance
of these I/O operations and the system stress they create. We used Iometer version
2006.07.27 on each solution to simulate the same file and print workloads on the
solutions. For more details about Iometer, see www.iometer.org.
IN CONCLUSION
Keeping a legacy, disparate hardware solution instead of choosing the new Dell
PowerEdge VRTX may cost you more than you realize. We found that the Dell
PowerEdge VRTX increased application performance over a legacy, disparate hardware
solution across email, database, and file/print server simultaneous workloads while
reducing power consumption by 19.8 percent. The VRTX did so in 70.6 percent less rack-
equivalent space than the legacy, disparate hardware solution and with one-third as
many cables, to reduce complexity and reduce the burden of space in small offices.
Finally, despite a larger initial investment, the Dell PowerEdge VRTX could actually lower
your total cost of ownership over years as much as 26.0 percent, delivering a solid
return on your investment in less than three years.
As our test results show, investing in the Dell PowerEdge VRTX solution could
provide you with a compact solution to optimize application performance, reduce
complexity, and even lower the total cost of your solution over its lifetime.