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Before discussing our testing and results, we want to acknowledge some of the obstacles your business may face when it comes to upgrading your servers. Like most decisions, cost plays an important role. TechTarget recommends considering not only the price of the server, but also the costs of IT resources, housing the server, and software licenses.1 Your IT department may be smaller than its corporate counterparts, potentially comprising just a few people, or even non-existent, if you choose a third party to manage your tech needs. During the server upgrade process—which can include researching data center solutions, deploying servers, learning new management tools, and providing support once the new tech is up and running—saving IT time might mean freeing up in-house IT admins to take care of other needs or keeping third-party costs low.
Once you decide it’s time to upgrade, you face the complex consideration of matching your needs to a server solution. For example, the security features you require may lend themselves to only a certain type of hardware. Performance expectations are another important factor in your decision. A lower-cost solution that “might not be powerful or reliable enough to handle mission-critical workloads” could deliver a poor experience to both customers and employees.2 Such a solution may not be worth the up-front savings, as it could have a shorter lifecycle, meaning an earlier investment in hardware, licensing, and IT resources for another upgrade.
However, overinvesting in the highest-performing solution could also negatively impact the value you get from your technology—you don’t want to spend more to equip your data center for needs your organization doesn’t have. Instead, you may consider whether your environment’s requirements justify the cost of newer NVMe™ drives or more storage, for example, or whether SAS or SATA SSDs or less storage would suffice. And while your organization might benefit from the compute power of a dual-socket solution, a solution with fewer processors or cores could result in significant licensing savings. (To learn more about the ways a single-socket, 32-core server could reduce licensing costs, see "Possible scenario: Licensing costs" in this report.) As you consider processor counts and performance, you may find that the processor architecture that fits your needs differs from the architecture you currently use. While we didn’t test migrating the workloads from our legacy PowerEdge solution to our newer one, according to AMD, “virtual machines can easily be migrated between AMD EPYC™ processors and Intel Xeon processors without any specialized tools or software.”3
Whatever your unique business needs are, assessing your current requirements and future opportunities such as the types of workloads you run, the hardware specifications you need, the number of customers and employees you support, the IT resources you have, the security you require, and the growth you anticipate—can help you select a hardware solution to carry you into the future.
1 Robert Sheldon, “How to purchase the best server hardware for small business,” accessed November 11, 2021, https://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/How-to-purchase-the-best-server-hardware-for-small-business.
2 Robert Sheldon, “How to purchase the best server hardware for small business.”
3 “AMD EPYC Virtual Machine Migration Guide,” accessed December 8, 2021, https://developer.amd.com/wp-content/resources/VM%20Migration%20Guide.pdf.