Home > Servers > Rack and Tower Servers > Intel > White Papers > Accelerate I/O with NVMe drives on the new Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 server > How we tested
We used a tool called Flexible input/output tester (FIO) to create the input/output (I/O) workloads that we used in testing. FIO “spawns a number of threads or processes doing a particular type of I/O action as specified by the user.”1 With the tool, we ran five workloads at varied thread counts and queue depths on RAID 10, RAID 6, and RAID 5 levels of the Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 server with the Dell PERC H755N Front RAID controller and NVMe drives and the Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 server with a PERC H730P Mini controller and SATA and SAS drives. Table 1 shows our workloads and their parameters.
Read-heavy workloads (such as those that featured either 100 or 70 percent of queries) indicate how quickly the servers can retrieve information from their disks. Write-heavy workloads show how quickly the servers can commit or save data to the disks. Seeing how each server performed with these different data-intensive workloads helps us understand how they could handle workloads of different block sizes.
“Random” and “sequential” in the workload descriptions refer to the access patterns for reading or writing data. An example of random reading is a user clicking different web links at random, which requires the server to pull data from multiple disks. In contrast, streaming video requires a server to read data in a single continuous stream, which is also known as sequential reading. Running both types of access patterns can offer insight into how servers might handle routine tasks that access, retrieve, or save data.
According to Dell, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 is an enterprise server that aims to optimize application performance and data center density. Offering new features such as support for PCIe Gen4, NVMe HWRAID, expanded memory capacity, Hot Plug BOSS controllers, and the latest generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors, this server has the potential to increase performance as well as reliability.
1 Axboe, Jens, “1. fio - Flexible I/O tester rev. 3.25,” accessed March 12, 2021, https://fio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fio_doc.html.