Release Notes
Dell PowerEdge R730xd Performance and Sizing Guide for Red Hat Ceph Storage - A Dell Red Hat Technical White Paper 8
For the latest specifications and full spec sheet on the PowerEdge R730xd server, please see
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-r730xd/pd.
The Dell PowerEdge R730xd offers advantages that include the ability to drive peak performance by:
Accelerating application performance with the latest technologies and dynamic local storage.
Scaling quickly and easily with front-accessible devices, ranging from low-cost SATA hard drives to
2.5” ultra-fast, low-latency PowerEdge Express Flash NVMe PCIe SSDs.
Using hybrid storage configurations to tailor the R730xd to your workload needs and implement
tiered-storage efficiencies. Combine 24-drive capacity with dual-PERC capability to drive storage
performance and take advantage of new Dell caching technologies to boost application
The Dell PowerEdge R730xd delivers greater versatility. Unlike previous generations of servers, the R730xd
can be tailored for application performance by mixing high-speed 1.8” SSDs and low-cost, high-capacity
3.5” hard drives in a single hybrid chassis, enabling accelerated data access through in-server storage
tiering. Examples of this versatility include:
In its 26-drive, dual-PERC configuration, the R730xd can be an excellent database server
delivering more than one million IOPS performance.
You can combine 26 drives with 24 DIMMs of memory and six PCI Express® (PCIe) expansion slots
to provide a resource-rich virtualization environment.
With up to four ultra-fast, ultra-low latency Express Flash NVMe PCIe SSDs, the R730xd can boost
performance on critical workloads and share the cache with other servers.
In its low-cost 16 x 3.5” drive configuration with up to 128TB capacity, the R730xd is an excellent
server for unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) and delivers the scale-out storage
efficiency demanded by the XaaS providers, Hadoop/big data users, and co-location hosting.
This technical white paper discusses the test results obtained by using different combinations of Dell
server hardware components to achieve throughput-optimized and cost/performance configurations.
Red Hat Ceph Storage was deployed on different hardware configurations of Dell PowerEdge R730xd
servers. The Ceph Benchmarking Toolkit (CBT) was used to test different parameters. Both read and write
operations were performed to test throughput, price/performance, price/GB, differences between
replicated and erasure-coded methods, and differences between HBA JBOD and single-disk RAID0 mode.
A total of 880 tests in single-drive RAID0 and HBA JBOD modes were performed using 88 different
configurations with 10 varying workloads.
Table 2 below shows a summary of the PowerEdge R730xd and Ceph Storage configurations used for
benchmark tests used for this paper.