Home > Servers > Rack and Tower Servers > Intel > White Papers > Lower your TCO by selecting the right platform for your Oracle workloads > CapEx: acquisition costs
In evaluating acquisition costs, our study intentionally disregarded the costs of components that would be equivalent across the platforms. These components include storage area networks (SANs), network switches, cables, and other hardware common to all tested systems.
In addition, hardware costs were based on retail pricing without discounts. Vendors typically offer discounts to customers based on the size of the order, customer relationship history, and other factors. In order to ensure an apples- to-apples comparison, we solicited non-discounted pricing from Dell Technologies and IBM for this study.
Comparing hardware across systems, our analysis found that a two-socket Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd with 36 cores and 576 GB of memory provides 82 percent CapEx savings over a two-socket IBM Power System S924 with 24 cores and 1,536 GB of memory (see Figure 1).4
As shown in Figure 2, a comparison of four-socket systems yielded similar results. The Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 with 72 cores and 1,152 GB of memory provides a 90 percent savings over the IBM Power System E950 with 48 cores and 3,072 GB of memory.5 (See Appendix B for a breakdown of the pricing.)
Figure 1. Normalized comparisons of hardware costs for two-socket Dell Technologies™ and IBM® Power® Systems servers (lower is better)
Figure 2. Normalized comparisons of hardware costs for four-socket Dell Technologies™ and IBM® Power® Systems servers (lower is better)
4 $158,079 for the IBM® Power® System S924 versus $28,024 for the Dell EMC™ PowerEdge™ R740xd. IBM price provided to Prowess Consulting May 6, 2020, and is for an IBM Power System S924 running 2 x 12-core IBM® POWER9™ processors and 6 x 64 GB DDR4 memory. Dell pricing provided to Prowess Consulting December 4, 2020, and is for 2 x 18-core Intel® Xeon® Gold 6240 processors and 12 x 16 GB plus 12 x 32 GB DRAM..
5 $608,422 for the IBM® Power® System E950 versus $57,619 for Dell EMC™ PowerEdge™ R940. IBM price provided to Prowess Consulting May 6, 2020, and is for an IBM Power System E950 running 4 x 12-core IBM® POWER9™ processors and 48 x 64 GB DDR4 memory. Dell pricing provided to Prowess Consulting December 4, 2020 and is for 4 x 24-core Intel® Xeon® Gold 6240 processors with 24 x 16 GB plus 24 x 32 GB DRAM.