Specifications

A Principled Technologies test report 6
Hardware upgrades to improve database, SharePoint, Exchange, and
file server performance with the Intel processor-powered Dell
PowerEdge T630
APPENDIX A – ABOUT THE COMPONENTS
About the Dell PowerEdge T630
The Dell PowerEdge T630 is a two-socket tower server, a member of the thirteenth generation of PowerEdge
servers, and designed to accelerate demanding workloads. According to Dell, the PowerEdge T630 can provide benefits
in the following ways:
 Performance: The latest Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family powers the PowerEdge T630. In
addition, the PowerEdge T630 has DDR4 memory and seven I/O slots.
 Capacity: The PowerEdge T630 supports up to 32 2.5″ or 18 3.5″ hard drives for a maximum capacity of up
to 72 TB. Flexible storage configurations can allow your business to meet exacting workload requirements,
while ample drive space can allow for cost-effective, in-server expansion.
 Storage I/O: Up to four NVMe Express™ Flash PCIe® SSDs and the optional 12Gb PowerEdge RAID Controller
(PERC9) make the PowerEdge T630 a strong choice for IOPs-hungry workloads. In-server storage tiering and
multi-mode RAID options can help optimize virtual storage for VMware® vSAN™ and Microsoft Storage
Spaces.
 GPU: From graphical rendering to implementing virtual desktops, support for up to four optional GPU
accelerators enables additional performance and capability.
About the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family
According to Intel, the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family “helps IT address the growing demands
placed on infrastructure, from supporting business growth to enabling new services faster, delivering new applications in
the enterprise, technical computing, communications, storage, and cloud.” It also delivers benefits in performance,
power efficiency, virtualization, and security.
Learn more at www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-e5-brief.html
About our test workloads
Database testing
About DVD Store 2.1
To create our real-world ecommerce workload, we used the DVD Store Version 2.1 benchmarking tool. DS2
models an online DVD store, where customers log in, search for movies, and make purchases. DS2 reports these actions
in orders per minute that the system could handle, to show what kind of performance you could expect for your
customers. The DS2 workload also performs other actions, such as adding new customers, to exercise the wide range of
database functions you would need to run your ecommerce environment.
We ran DS2 with 32 threads per VM on both solutions, with a 0.1-second think time. Each SQL Server instance
needed to deliver a minimum of 14,000 OPM.
For more details about the DS2 tool, see www.delltechcenter.com/page/DVD+Store.
Mail testing
To test the solution’s 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 for the user mailboxes: