Home > Servers > Rack and Tower Servers > Intel > White Papers > Elevate your e-commerce with the PowerEdge R740xd with 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors > Big performance gains and new tech give many reasons to upgrade
Is any organization ever satisfied with the status quo? To succeed in business, you must grow—and with those new customer demands comes a need for updated hardware infrastructure to power vital transactions. If your data center is packed with legacy servers such as the 12th generation Dell EMC PowerEdge R720 and bulky external storage arrays, it may be time for a change. Even if you have servers with previous-generation processors, upgrading could make a worthwhile difference.
By upgrading to the latest technology, you can more efficiently use your data center space by doing more work per server or even consolidating servers into fewer new servers to save on space, power, cooling, and more. Plus, you get the latest in embedded server management, support for newer storage technologies, and can even reduce maintenance-related hassles and costs. Choosing a new 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor- powered Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd also lets you take advantage of software-defined storage (SDS), which can reduce the need for bulky, expensive external arrays.
The image below shows our test comparison. We sought to compare a true upgrade, where the legacy and previous-generation solutions use server hardware, storage options, and software versions that were likely in use at the time of purchase to show what benefits organizations could see by upgrading a complete solution. For the legacy solution, storage was the bottleneck; we were able to run six virtual machines (VMs) on it, and we subsequently ran six VMs on the other solutions, not seeking to maximize performance on them—both the previous-generation and new R740xd solutions could handle larger workloads, but we wanted to show how the same workload could benefit from upgraded software/hardware. Please note that the testbed for the new R740xd server cluster and the previous-generation solution were identical (see left in the diagram below), though they differed in software and hardware versions. While VMware recommends using two-node clusters for specific use cases such as extended data center hosted services, organizations frequently use larger clusters. We tested on a two-node cluster with a vSAN Witness server with the understanding that workloads on larger clusters would also see these performance advantages. To learn all the details behind our testing, visit the science behind the report.