Home > Servers > Rack and Tower Servers > Intel > White Papers > R740xd servers with Intel Optane DC persistent memory handle more than with NAND flash NVMe or SATA SSDs > How we tested Intel Optane DC persistent memory in our data center
To find out how SQL Server 2019 transactional database performance with Intel Optane DC persistent memory compared to using traditional storage, we tested multiple storage configurations in a Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd server:
*Please note that adding more NVMe SSDs or choosing different models could improve performance of the NVMe configurations; in our tests, the processor reached full utilization at four NVMe SSDs. Your workloads and results will vary.
For these tests, we used a TPC-C-derived workload that Dell EMC provided, and ran all Intel Optane tests in App Direct Mode. The TPC-C-like workload simulates a database application used by a parts supplier. The data model and application mimic a company with warehouses, parts, orders, customers, and sales districts, and the benchmarks reports performance in transactions per minute. Dell EMC provided this workload utility, which is not an officially audited TPC-C test and therefore is not comparable to published TPC-C results. The configurations we tested are for performance gauging only; we tested the NVMe drives as single devices without redundancy, which real-world organizations would require.
To use Intel Optane memory in App Direct Mode, we used software that recognizes the new technology and allows it to act in this way—VMware vSphere ESXi™ sees Intel Optane as persistent memory datastore (storage), reporting it as a persistent memory (PMEM) datastore in vCenter™. VMware also offers a choice of two modes to utilize Intel Optane memory in App Direct Mode:
For this study we used the vPMEM mode, as Microsoft SQL Server 2019 on Linux is PMEM aware and Microsoft has introduced SQL enlightenment to allow database files to live on an NVDIMM device. The diagram below shows how vSphere PMEM architecture works.