Six Years of Tower Servers: Exceptional Database Performance with PowerEdge T560
Thu, 12 Oct 2023 21:43:58 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
Transformation is an intrinsic part of the technological world, just as seasons transition and leaves change hue during fall. In the six years since the launch of 14th Generation PowerEdge servers, the tower servers have evolved greatly with no shortage of performance gains, feature improvements, and expanding workload capabilities. To demonstrate the magnitude and scope of these improvements, we tested two different workloads across the PowerEdge T440, T550, and T560 towers.
While we primarily discuss database workload testing in this blog, stay tuned for another post covering Artificial Intelligence (AI) inferencing in the coming weeks.
PowerEdge tower upgrades – T440 to T550 to T560
Before we get ahead of ourselves, there are a variety of feature improvements to highlight in the latest tower server--the PowerEdge T560--that make it well-worth the upgrade:
Table 1. PowerEdge T440 vs T550 vs T560 key features
| |||
CPU | 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors | 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors | 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors |
GPU | Up to 1 DW GPU | Up to 2 DW or 5 SW GPUs | Up to 2 DW or 6 SW GPU |
Drives up to: | 16 x 2.5” or 8 x 3.5” | 8 x 2.5” or 16 x 2.5” or 24 x 2.5” or 8 x 3.5” or 8 x 3.5” + 8 x 2.5” | 8 x 2.5’’ or 16 x 2.5’’ or 24 x 2.5’’ or 12 x 3.5’’ or 8 x 3.5’’ or 8 x 3.5’’ + 8 x 2.5’’ |
Memory | DDR4, up to 2666 MT/s DIMM Speed | DDR4, up to 3200 MT/s DIMM Speed | DDR5, up to 4800 MT/S DIMM Speed |
PCIe Slots | PCIe Gen3 slots | PCIe Gen4 slots | PCIe Gen5 slots |
As Table 1 illustrates, the T560 is truly a powerhouse, designed to reflect the evolving workload requirements of small to medium businesses from office to edge. Compared to the T550, the T560 has 20% greater GPU capacity. Considering Forrester projects a 36% average annual growth in generative AI spending, this increased GPU capacity is fantastic for businesses looking to pursue emerging AI workloads.
There are also huge benefits associated with the jump from 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Processors in the T440 to 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Processors in the T560, including up to 1.8x greater memory bandwidth. Learn more about memory bandwidth for Next-Gen PowerEdge Servers here. Additionally, PCIe Gen 5 doubles the data transfer rate compared to PCIe Gen 4 and quadruples the transfer rate compared to PCIe Gen 3, described in greater detail here. The T560 also supports the latest PowerEdge RAID Controller 12 (PERC 12), while the T550 only supports PERC 11 and the T440 only supports PERC 9. Read about the performance improvements of PERC 12 here.
And these are just the highlights. Find more information on the technologies powering Next Generation PowerEdge servers here.
Figure 1. From left to right: T440, T550, T560
PowerEdge T560 accelerates database workloads
Throughout the world of small and medium businesses, one use case and attendant application cuts across nearly every enterprise: the Database. PowerEdge tower servers enable businesses to maintain control of vital customer data in a high-speed array of drives, all in your chosen database type. As demonstrated by lab testing, selecting a latest-gen T560 can provide up to 3x the transactions per second (read/write performance) compared to the T440 and 2.6x the transactions per second compared to the T550.[1]
When using a relational database with complex queries and large volumes of data, performance is pivotal. As we all know and have experienced, data often grows exponentially over the course of work and business. The exceptional read/write performance, scalable storage capacity, and easy deployment of the T560 keeps businesses ahead of this deluge of data and its associated headaches.
Testing Details and Results
On all three towers, we ran a Phoronix Test Suite to evaluate database performance with PostgreSQL, an open-source SQL relational database that is popular with small businesses. The testing configurations are listed in the following table. Each system has a Gold-class Intel® Xeon® processor, equal memory capacity, and storage to reflect industry transitions. All testing was conducted in a Dell Technologies lab.
Table 2. Testing Configurations
| PowerEdge T440 | PowerEdge T550 | PowerEdge T560 |
CPU | Intel® Xeon® Gold 5222 4c/8T, TDP 105W | Intel® Xeon® Gold 6338N 32c/64T, TDP 185W | Intel® Xeon® Gold 6448Y 32c/64T, TDP 225W |
Storage | 4x 800 GB SAS SSD (RAID 5) | 4x 960 GB SAS SSD | 4x 1.6TB NVMe |
Memory | 512 GB DDR4
| 512 GB DDR4 | 512 GB DDR5 |
The read/write performance (measured in transactions per second) of the PostgreSQL database workload is shown in Figure 2. These results correspond to the test with 800 clients and a scaling factor of 10,000. Clients essentially represent the number of users, and the scaling factor is a multiplier for the number of rows in each table.
Figure 2. PostgreSQL read/write performance gains compared to PowerEdge T560
As previously discussed, this performance benchmark reveals PowerEdge T560 to be 2.6x faster than the PowerEdge T550 and 3.1x faster than the PowerEdge T440 in PostgreSQL workloads.
We also evaluated memory bandwidth across all three systems using STREAM. This benchmark is used throughout the tech industry to characterize memory bandwidth on many different devices. Synthetic benchmarks can be useful to show the relative performance of new technologies objectively. In the following figure, we report STREAM’s Triad (in GB/s), which is the most complex scenario in the benchmark.
Figure 3. Memory bandwidth gains compared to PowerEdge T560
The PowerEdge T560 is 1.75x faster (in GB/s) than the T550 and 2.7x faster than the T440, both of which have DDR4 memory. These results confirm the massive increase in memory bandwidth with DDR5.[2]
Concluding Thoughts
Choosing a server with great headroom for supporting more transactions per second helps future-proof businesses against the performance roadblocks that inevitably arise as data needs grow. With 2.7x faster memory speeds and up to 3x the transactions per second compared to the T440, the PowerEdge T560 delivers both exceptional performance and scalability for data-driven businesses of any size.
While all three towers are prepared for a variety of workloads, the next-gen technologies in the T560 make it a great investment for businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve, especially in terms of database performance. Remember to look out for our next blog which reveals results from two AI inferencing benchmarks--Intel’s OpenVINO and TensorFlow--tested on these same systems.
For now, we’ll leave you with this:
Why did the tower server go apple picking?
To find the core of its processing power!
Don’t worry, we groaned too.
Resources
- Forrester Generative AI Report
- Sapphire Rapids and Memory Bandwidth
- PCIe Gen 5 Performance
- Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller 12 (PERC 12) 16th Generation (16G) Server Performance vs PERC 11 & PERC 10 (delltechnologies.com)
- Dell PowerEdge 16G Intel Servers Announced - StorageReview.com
- PostgreSQL pgbench Benchmark - OpenBenchmarking.org
- PostgreSQL: Documentation: 16: pgbench
- STREAM Benchmark
Authors: Olivia Mauger, Jeremy Johnson, Delmar Hernandez | Compute Tech Marketing
[1] Based on September 2023 Dell Technologies lab testing on PowerEdge T440, T550, and T560. We used a public PostgreSQL benchmark via Phoronix Test Suite.
[2] Based on September 2023 Dell Technologies lab testing on PowerEdge T440, T550, and T560. We used the public STREAM benchmark via Phoronix Test Suite.