Break through performance barriers
If your organization is on the road to infrastructure modernization, chances are good that your underlying legacy virtualization clusters are being stretched to their limits. This could mean suboptimal performance and resiliency, which can make it difficult to scale clusters and meet service-level agreements (SLAs).
In addition, with overtaxed and aging clusters, you can’t virtualize applications that you would like to because of performance requirements, which can mean a larger data center footprint and higher corresponding power and cooling costs.
If you’re thinking about refreshing and modernizing your legacy virtualization environments, you might want to consider a Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI.
Solution overview
This all-in-one validated hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution includes full-stack lifecycle management, native integration into Microsoft Azure, flexible consumption models and solution-level enterprise support and services expertise. Dell EMC Integrated System for Azure Stack HCI is available in a broad range of configurations, and it include engineering-validated AX nodes and networking topologies with Dell EMC PowerSwitch network switches. This design and validation can help ensure that every component—including firmware and driver versions—is optimized for demanding workloads.
Dell Technologies performed synthetic workload testing on one of these systems to see how it performed with highly demanding real-world application profiles. The cluster included four AX-7525 nodes, each populated with two 64-core AMD EPYC™ 7742 processors, 24 NVM Express (NVMe) drives (PCIe Gen4) and 100 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) remote direct memory access (RDMA) networking. Dell Technologies tested workloads under these conditions:
- Healthy cluster running 64 virtual machines (VMs) per node
- Healthy cluster running 32 VMs per node
- Degraded cluster with one node failed
- Degraded cluster with two nodes failed
The configuration delivered outstanding results in all tested scenarios, even when the cluster was in a degraded condition. This means that end users will not notice reduced response times, even if it takes IT longer to return the cluster to its fully operational state. You’ll find all the testing details and results in this white paper.
Reasons to believe
When you modernize your virtualization clusters by deploying Dell EMC Integrated System for Azure Stack HCI, you can:
- Virtualize demanding applications that historically needed to remain on physical servers because of their performance requirements.
- Take advantage of a performant, modernized infrastructure that can support the most demanding business services.
- Save precious real estate in the data center by minimizing the cluster size required to deliver performance SLAs.
- Accelerate online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads and improve end-user response times for database applications.
- Achieve fast times to insight with exceptional online analytical processing (OLAP) performance.
- Deliver high throughput at low latency, which means outstanding performance for applications like Microsoft SQL Server.
- Monitor and manage many aspects of the cluster with Dell EMC OpenManage Integration with Microsoft Windows Admin Center. This tool includes one-click, full-stack lifecycle management with Cluster-Aware Updating, dynamic CPU core management, automated cluster creation and cluster expansion.
To see our full test environment details and results and to learn more about Dell EMC Integrated System for Azure Stack HCI, download the white paper, Crash Through Workload Performance Boundaries with Azure Stack HCI.
