Power Management is when the clock speed of your processors is reduced (usually by changing the processor multiplier value) in order to use less electrical power when the processor is not under a heavy load. On the surface, this seems like a good idea, since electrical power costs can be pretty significant in a data center. Throttling back a processor can save some electricity and reduce your heat output, which can reduce your cooling costs in a data center. Unfortunately, with some processors, and with some types of SQL Server workloads (particularly OLTP workloads), you will pay a pretty significant performance price (in the range of 20-25%) for those electrical power savings.

When a processor has power management features that are enabled, the clock speed of the processor will vary based on the load the processor is experiencing. You can watch this in near real-time with a tool like CPU-Z, that displays the current clock speed of Core 0. The performance problem comes from the fact that some processors don’t seem to react fast enough to an increase in load to give their full performance potential, particularly for very short OLTP queries that often execute in a few milliseconds.

This problem seems to show up especially with Intel Xeon 5500, 7500 (Nehalem-EP and EX), Intel Xeon 5600, E7 series processors (Westmere-EP and EX families) and with the AMD Opteron 6100, 6200, and 6300 series (Magny Cours, Bulldozer and Piledriver families). Much older processors don’t have any power management features, and some slightly older processors (such as the Intel Xeon 5300 and 5400 series) seem to handle power management slightly better. I have also noticed that the Intel Sandy Bridge-EP processors seem to handle power management a little better than the Nehalem and Westmere did, i.e. they don’t show as noticeable of a performance decrease when power management is enabled.

Basically, you have two types of power management that you need to be aware of as a database professional. The first type is hardware-based power management, where the main system BIOS of a server is set to allow the processors to manage their own power states, based on the load they are seeing from the operating system. The second type is software-based power management, where the operating system (with Windows Server 2008 and above) is in charge of power management using one of the standard Windows Power Plans, or a customized version of one of those plans. When you install Windows Server 2008 or above, Windows will be using the Balanced Power Plan by default. When you are using the Balanced Power Plan, Intel processors that have Turbo Boost Technology will not use Turbo Boost (meaning that they will not temporarily overclock individual processor cores for more performance).

So, after all of this, what do I recommend you do for your database server? First, check your Windows Power Plan setting, and make sure you are using the High Performance Power Plan. This can be changed dynamically without a restart. Next, run CPU-Z, and make sure your processor is running at or above its rated speed. If it is running at less than its rated speed with the High Performance Power Plan, that means that you have hardware power management overriding what Windows has asked for. That means you are going to have to restart your server (in your next maintenance window) and go into your BIOS settings and either disable power management or set it to OS control (which I prefer).

The post A SQL Server Hardware Tidbit a Day – Day 27 appeared first on Glenn Berry.

Back in 2005-2006, you could buy a two-socket Dell PowerEdge 1850, with two hyper-threaded Intel Xeon “Irwindale” 3.2GHz processors and 16GB of RAM (with a total of four logical cores). This was fine for an application or web server, but it did not have the CPU horsepower (the 32-bit Geekbench score was about 2200) or memory capacity for a heavy duty database workload.

Around the same time, you could also buy a four-socket Dell PowerEdge 6850, with four dual-core, Intel Xeon 7040 “Paxville” 3.0GHz processors and 64GB of RAM (with a total of 16 logical cores with hyper-threading enabled). This was a much better choice for a database server because of the additional processor, memory, and I/O capacity compared to a PowerEdge 1850. Even so, its Geekbench score was only about 4400, which is pretty pathetic by today’s standards. Back in 2006-2007, it still made perfect sense to buy a four-socket database server for most database server workloads.

By late 2007, you could buy a two-socket Dell PowerEdge 1950, with two, quad-core Intel Xeon E5450 processors and 32GB of RAM (with a total of eight logical cores) and you would actually have a pretty powerful platform for a database server. A system like this would have a 32-bit Geekbench score of about 8000. The biggest weakness of this system was having only two x8 PCI-E 1.0 expansion slots.

By late 2008, you could buy a four-socket Dell PowerEdge R900, with four, six-core Intel Xeon X7460 processors and 256GB of RAM (with a total of of 24 logical cores). This was a very powerful , but costly platform for a database server, with a 32-bit Geekbench score of around 16500. There are still many of these model servers being used for production purposes, and while they sound impressive, that are actually a very bad choice for an upgrade to SQL Server 2012 because of their high physical core counts and low single-threaded performance. The Xeon X7460 was the last generation of Intel SMP processors, before the NUMA-capable Nehalem was introduced.

By early 2009, you could buy a two-socket Dell PowerEdge R710, with two, quad-core Intel Xeon X5570 processors, and 144GB of RAM (with a total of 16 logical cores) and you would have a very powerful database server platform. This system would have a 32-bit Geekbench score of around 15000. This would give you fairly close to the capacity of a four-socket R900, with better single-threaded performance.

By early 2010, you could buy that same Dell PowerEdge R710, with more powerful six-core Intel Xeon X5680 processors (with a total of 24 logical cores), and push the 32-bit Geekbench score to about 22500. This gives you quite a bit more CPU capacity than the PowerEdge R900 that you bought in late 2008. If you are concerned about 144GB of RAM not being enough memory in the R710, you could buy two R710s, and have nearly triple the CPU capacity of a single R900. This assumes that you can split your database workload between two database servers, by moving databases or doing things like vertical or horizontal partitioning of an existing large database.

Finally, by mid-2012, you could buy a 12th generation, Dell PowerEdge R720, with even faster eight-core Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors (with a total of 32 logical cores), which would push the 32-bit Geekbench score to about 29000.  The R720 has 24 memory slots, so you can have 384GB of RAM with 16GB DIMMs or 768 GB of RAM with more expensive 32GB DIMMs. You also get seven PCI-E 3.0 expansion slots, which gives you more potential I/O bandwidth than you can get with a four-socket server (since they are still using the older PCI-E 2.0 standard).

This gap will open up even more in Q3 of 2013, when the 12-core, 22nm Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 series (Ivy Bridge-EP) processors are released. These will be pin-compatible with the current E5-2600 series, so they will work with current model servers (probably requiring a BIOS update). They should be available very quickly after Intel releases them.

This overall trend has been continuing over the past several years, with Intel introducing new processors in the two socket space roughly a year ahead of introducing a roughly equivalent new processor in the four socket space. This means that you will get much better single-threaded OLTP performance from a two-socket system than from a four-socket system of the same age (as long as your I/O subsystem is up to par).

Given the choice, I would rather have two, two-socket machines instead of one, four-socket machines in almost all cases. The only big exception would be a case where you absolutely need to have far more memory in a single server that you can get in a two socket machine (a Dell PowerEdge R720 can now go up to 768GB if you are willing to pay for 32GB DIMMs), and you are unable to do any re-engineering to split up your load between two servers.

If you want to dive deeper into this subject, you might want to listen to my latest Pluralsight course, which is SQL Server 2012:Evaluating and Sizing Hardware. You can also contact us if you are interested in expert hardware consulting as you get ready to upgrade your database hardware.

The post A SQL Server Hardware Tidbit a Day – Day 25 appeared first on Glenn Berry.

This Tick-Tock release strategy benefits the DBA in a number of ways. It offers better predictability regarding when major (Tock) and minor (Tick) releases will be available. This helps you plan your upgrade strategy and schedule.

Tick releases are usually socket-compatible with the previous year’s Tock release, which makes it easier for the system manufacturer to make the latest Tick release processor available in existing server models more quickly, without completely redesigning the system. In most cases, only a BIOS update is required to allow an existing system to use a newer Tick release processor. This makes it easier for you to maintain servers that are using the same model number (such as a Dell PowerEdge R720 server), since the server model will have a longer manufacturing life span.

As a DBA, you need to know where a particular processor falls in Intel’s processor family tree if you want to be able to meaningfully compare the relative performance of two different processors. Historically, processor performance has nearly doubled with each new Tock release, while performance usually goes up by 20-25% with a Tick release. This historical pattern is starting to change as Intel is beginning to focus more on power efficiency rather that increasing single-threaded performance.

Some of the recent and upcoming Intel Tick-Tock releases are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Intel’s Tick-Tock Release Strategy

The manufacturing process technology refers to the size of the individual circuits and transistors on the chip. The Intel 4004 (released in 1971) series used a 10-micron process; the smallest feature on the processor was 10 millionths of a meter across. By contrast, the Intel Xeon “Sandy Bridge” E5 series (released in 2012) uses a 32nm process. For comparison, a nanometer is one billionth of a meter, so 10-microns would be 10000 nanometers! This ever-shrinking manufacturing process is important for two main reasons:

Increased performance and lower power usage – even at the speed of light, distance matters, so having smaller components that are closer together on a processor means better performance and lower power usage.
Lower manufacturing costs – since you can produce more processors from a standard silicon wafer. This helps make more powerful and more power efficient processors available at a lower cost, which is beneficial to everyone, but especially for the database administrator.

The first Tock release was the Intel Core microarchitecture, which was introduced as the dual-core “Woodcrest” (Xeon 5100 series) in 2006, with a 65nm process technology. This was followed up by a shrink to 45nm process technology in the dual-core “Wolfdale”  (Xeon 5200 series) and quad-core “Harpertown” processors (Xeon 5400 series) in late 2007, both of which were Tick releases.

The next Tock release was the Intel “Nehalem” microarchitecture (Xeon 5500 series), which used a 45nm process technology, introduced in late 2008. In 2010, Intel released a Tick release, code-named “Westmere” (Xeon 5600 series) that shrank to 32nm process technology in the server space. In 2011, the Sandy Bridge Tock release debuted with the E3-1200 series for single socket servers and workstations.  All of these other examples are for two socket servers, but Intel uses Tick Tock for all of their processors. Figure 2 shows this “family history” for Intel server processors.

Figure 2: Recent and Upcoming Intel Processor Families

The post A SQL Server Hardware Tidbit a Day – Day 4 appeared first on Glenn Berry.

I will start this series by talking about the Intel Xeon E5-2600 product family processor line, which is also known as the Sandy Bridge-EP. This product family includes the Intel Xeon E5-1600 series, Intel Xeon E5-2600 series and the Intel Xeon E5-4600 series, for different socket-count servers, but I am only going to cover the more popular Intel Xeon E5-2600 series today.

The Intel Xeon E5-2600 series (“Sandy Bridge-EP”) is a four, six or eight-core processor used in two socket servers starting in March 2012. It is based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, and it has both hyper-threading technology and turbo boost capability (although some specific models do not have hyper-threading enabled). It was a Tock release for Intel, which means that is has a new microarchitecture compared to the previous Nehalem microarchitecture. It is built on 32nm process technology, and has clock speeds ranging from 1.8GHz to 3.3GHz with an L3 cache size of 10MB to 20MB, depending on the number of physical cores in the processor. QPI bandwidth ranges from 6.4GT/s to 8.0GT/s.

It uses Socket LGA 2011, and uses the Intel C604 chipset. It has an improved memory controller and a larger L3 cache compared to the previous Intel Xeon 5600 series. It also has PCI 3.0 support, which gives you double the sequential I/O bandwidth of the older PCI 2.0 standard. This is currently Intel’s highest performance processor for single-threaded workloads, which means that it is especially suited for OLTP performance. It is definitely the best Intel two-socket processor for SQL Server OLTP workloads in the early-2012 to late-2013 timeframe, until the upcoming “Ivy Bridge-EP” becomes available.

If you have ever heard me give one of my SQL Server Hardware presentations over the past year, you know that this is my favorite processor for most SQL Server 2012 OLTP workloads. The top of the line, eight-core Intel Xeon E5-2690 has enough CPU and memory capacity to replace most older four-socket servers, and it will give extremely good single-threaded performance. It allows you to have up to 384GB of RAM in a two-socket server, using affordable 16GB DDR3 RDIMMs.

If you are running SQL Server 2008 R2 or older (with socket-based licensing), the Xeon E5-2690 is absolutely your best processor choice for a two-socket, OLTP database server. If you are running SQL Server 2012, and you are concerned about minimizing your SQL Server 2012 core-based licensing costs, you should look at the four-core, Intel Xeon E5-2643. This processor will actually give you slightly better single-threaded performance (due to its higher 3.3GHz base clock speed) than the E5-2690, with a 50% reduction in your SQL Server 2012 core-based license cost. Of course you will give up about 45-50% of your CPU capacity, which may or may not be acceptable.

Figure 1 shows the Intel Xeon processor “family tree”. There is always some delay between the introduction of a new microarchitecture on the desktop and mobile space until it shows up in single-socket, and then two-socket, and finally four-socket and larger servers. The Sandy Bridge-EP was not released until March 2012, while the Ivy Bridge-EP will probably show up in Q3 of 2013.

Figure 1: Intel Xeon Processor Families

The post A SQL Server Hardware Tidbit a Day – Day 1 appeared first on Glenn Berry.

What is notable about this is that the 3218.46 score for a four-socket Xeon E7-4870 system is significantly higher than we have seen for similar four-socket Xeon E7-4870 systems in the past. An especially good comparison is between an IBM System x3850 X5 that was submitted on June 27, 2011 and this latest result for an IBM System x3850 X5 system that was submitted on November 28, 2012.  As you can see in Table 1, the newer submission for the same model server has a 12.4% higher score than the older submission. This is for the exact same model server, with the exact same number and model of processors.  The first big difference that jumps out is that the newer submission is running SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition on top of Windows Server 2012 Standard Edition, while the older submission is running SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition on top of Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition.

Table 1: Comparing Two IBM System x3850 X5 TPC-E Submissions

Could this 12.4% performance jump be simply due to the newer operating system and the newer version of SQL Server?  It is very possible that there were some low level improvements in Windows Server 2012 that work in conjunction with SQL Server 2012 to improve performance (similar to what we saw with Windows Server 2008 R2 combined with SQL Server 2008 R2). With Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft did some low-level optimizations so that they could scale from 64 logical processors to 256 logical processors. This work also benefitted smaller systems with fewer logical processors.  I think it is likely that some similar work was done with Windows Server 2012, so that it could scale from 256 logical processors to 640 logical processors, so that might explain some of the performance increase. I have some questions in to some of my friends at Microsoft, trying to get some more detailed information about this possibility.

It is also possible that there were improvements in SQL Server 2012 all by itself that contributed to the performance increase. Another possibility is that the TPC-E team at IBM just did a much better job on this newer system. If you dive deeper into the two submissions, you will notice some other differences in the hardware and the environment for the test.  The newer submission is a system with 2048GB of RAM and (126) 200GB SAS SSDs for database storage, with a 13.3TB initial database size, while the older submission is a system with 1024GB of RAM and (90) 200GB SAS SSDs for database storage, with a 11.6TB initial database size. As long as you have sufficient I/O capacity to drive the TPC-E workload, the TPC-E score is usually limited by processor performance, so I don’t really think that the RAM and I/O differences are that significant here.

What do you think about this?  I would love to hear your opinions and comments!

The post Two New TPC-E Submissions for SQL Server 2012 appeared first on Glenn Berry.

Since 2006, Intel has been using a Tick-Tock release model for their processors. What this means is that every two years, they have a Tock release that uses a completely new microarchitecture, which is followed a year later by a Tick release that has a manufacturing process technology shrink, but uses the same microarchitecture as the previous Tock release. Using a smaller process technology typically allows the processor to use less energy and have slightly better performance than the previous Tock release, but the performance jump is not nearly as great as you get with a Tock release. Tick releases are usually pin-compatible with the previous Tock release, so that lets the hardware systems vendors start using the Tick release processor in their existing models much more quickly, usually with just a BIOS update.

Table 1 shows the Tick-Tock release cadence for Intel processors from 2008 through 2016. The dates are obviously more speculative as we go further into the future, since Intel may decide to slow down their release cycle if AMD is unable to give them more viable competition in the next few years.

Table 1: Tick-Tock Release Listing

Figure 1 shows how the Tick-Tock model works, with the Tock release (in blue) using the existing manufacturing process technology, while the Tick release (in orange) moves to a new, smaller manufacturing process technology. New Intel processors are first released for the desktop market, and then for the mobile market, followed later by the single-socket server market, the two-socket server market and finally the four-socket server (and above) market coming last. The four-socket server server market does not always get every release because of the lower sales volume and slower release cycle. This explains why there has not been a Sandy Bridge-EX release for the four-socket market.

Figure 1: Tick-Tock Model

As you can see from Table 1 and Figure 1, Sandy Bridge is a Tock release that came after the Westmere Tick release. The Xeon E5 product family is Sandy Bridge-EP, which is a newer microarchitecture compared to the Xeon E7 product family, which is Westmere-EX. This difference is very important for SQL Server 2012 core-based licensing purposes! Sandy Bridge has significantly better single-threaded performance compared to Westmere and it also has lower physical core counts. Sandy Bridge-EP is available for both two-socket and four-socket servers, while Westmere-EX is available for two-socket, four-socket, and eight-socket servers.

Currently, we have the Intel Xeon E5-2600 product family (Sandy Bridge-EP) for the two-socket space, the Intel Xeon E5-4600 product family (Sandy Bridge-EP) for the four-socket space, along with the older Intel Xeon E7-2800 product family (Westmere-EX) for the two-socket space, the Intel Xeon E7-4800 product family (Westmere-EX) for the four-socket space, and the Intel Xeon E7-8800 product family (Westmere-EX) for the eight-socket space. The Intel Xeon E7 family was released in Q2 2011, the Xeon E5-2600 family was released in Q1 2012, and the Xeon E5-4600 family was released in Q2 2012. On November 5, 2012, Fujitsu published a new TPC-E OLTP benchmark result for a four-socket, Intel Xeon E5-4650 PRIMERGY RX500 S7 system with a score of 2651.27. This is the first published TPC-E result for the newer, four-socket capable Intel Xeon E5-4600 series, so I think it merits some comparison and discussion.

Table 2 shows the TPC-E scores for five systems that use the the five different Sandy Bridge and Westmere processors that I have been discussing so far. It shows that the two-socket Xeon E5-2690 system has the best single-threaded performance, (when you divide the raw score by the number of physical cores) and that the four-socket Xeon E5-4650 system comes in second place. We also see that the scaling goes down quite a bit as we move from two sockets to four sockets with the Xeon E5 family. If we had perfectly linear scaling, you would expect a four-socket system to have twice the score of a two-socket system that was using the same processor, which is not the case here. Part of this can be attributed to the clock speed difference between the 2.9GHz Xeon E5-2690 and the 2.7GHz Xeon E5-4650.

We can also see that the Intel Xeon E5 family does quite a bit better on TPC-E than the Intel Xeon E7 family does, which is no surprise, since we are comparing the newer Sandy Bridge-EP to the older Westmere-EX. From a performance perspective, the two-socket Xeon E5-2690 does much better than the two-socket Xeon E7-2870. In my opinion, you really should not be using the two-socket Xeon E7-2870 for SQL Server 2012 because of its lower single-threaded performance and higher physical core counts (which means a higher SQL Server 2012 licensing cost).

The four-socket Xeon E7-4870 system has a higher raw score than the four-socket E5-4650 system, but it has 40 physical cores compared to 32 physical cores, which means it will cost significantly more for for SQL Server 2012 core licenses, while it will have lower single-threaded performance. Again, I would prefer a Xeon E5-4650 based system over a Xeon E7-4870 based system for an OLTP workload. You can also see that scaling takes a pretty big hit when you go from four-socket systems to eight-socket systems, even though these are all NUMA-based systems here.

Table 2: TPC-E Score Comparisons for Selected Intel Processors

Table 3: SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition License Cost Comparisons by TPC-E Score

Table 3 shows the same five systems with the SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition license cost information added. This shows that a two-socket system with Xeon E5-2690 processors gives you the lowest licensing cost per TPC-E score, while Table 2 shows that it also gives you the best TPC-E score per physical processor core. Unless you must have more than 384GB of RAM (with affordable 16GB DIMMs) or more than 768GB of RAM (with much more expensive 32GB DIMMs), there are not too many reasons to go with a higher core-count system for an OLTP workload.

One possible reason is that you are concerned that a two-socket Xeon E5-2690 system simply cannot handle your total database workload. Two processors with a total of 16 physical cores is simply not enough computing capacity for your workload. Depending on the magnitude of your workload, that may be true. If you are currently running a four-socket or larger system that is more than a couple of years old, that may not be true. Bigger systems are not faster systems, and the total load capacity of two socket systems has increased dramatically in the last year with Sandy Bridge-EP.  If you are convinced that a two-socket Xeon E5-2690 cannot handle your workload, I would look at a four-socket Xeon E5-4650 system, which also lets you go up to 1.5TB of RAM with 32GB DIMMs.  Keep in mind that both Xeon E5-2690 and Xeon E5-4650 systems have PCI-E 3.0 support, which gives you twice the I/O bandwidth of the older PCI-E 2.0 standard found in Westmere-EX servers.

If all of this has made your head hurt, you can always contact us for some deeper hardware consulting!

The post Deciding What Processor to Choose for SQL Server 2012 appeared first on Glenn Berry.

Dell PowerEdge R320
This model server has a 1U form factor, one processor socket, and uses the Intel Xeon E5-2400 series processor. It has six memory slots (96GB total RAM with 16GB DIMMs), has eight 2.5 inch drive bays, and has one PCI-E 3.0 x8 and one PCI-E 3.0 x16 expansion slots. It has a total of four, six, or eight physical cores for SQL Server 2012 core licensing purposes. It has a total of eight, twelve, or sixteen logical cores with Intel hyper-threading enabled. The R320 is an interesting option for some smaller workloads, since it uses the Xeon E5-2400 series Sandy Bridge-EN processor (that is usually used in two-socket systems) instead of the Xeon E3-1200 Sandy Bridge or Xeon E3-1200 v2 series Ivy Bridge processor that is used in most new single-socket servers. This lets you use up to 96GB of RAM instead of being limited to 32GB of RAM, and it lets you have up to eight physical processor cores instead of being limited to four physical processor cores. The downside of this is being limited to slower processor clock speeds with the E5-2400 series compared to the E3-1200 series processors, which means you will see slower single-threaded performance. The R320 might be a good choice for a DW type of workload, where the extra processor cores and higher memory capacity would be more useful. A single-socket server with an Intel E3-1200 v2 series processor would be better for a small OLTP workload. Keep in mind that SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition is limited to 64GB of RAM.

Dell PowerEdge R420
This model server has a 1U form factor, two processor sockets, and uses Intel Xeon E5-2400 series processors. It also has twelve memory slots (192GB total RAM with 16GB DIMMs), has eight 2.5 inch drive bays, and has two PCI-E 3.0 x16 expansion slots. It has a total of eight, twelve, or sixteen physical cores for SQL Server 2012 core licensing purposes. It has a total of sixteen, 24, or 32 logical cores with Intel hyper-threading enabled. This model is a bad choice for SQL Server 2012. The Xeon E5-2400 series  Sandy Bridge-EN processor is very limited  compared to the Xeon E5-2600 series Sandy Bridge-EP processor. It has slower clock speeds, less memory bandwidth, and less memory capacity. Since you pay the same amount for each SQL Server 2012 core license regardless of what type of physical core is in the processor, the E5-2400 series is a bad choice compared to the E5-2600 series. Another problem with this model server is the fact that it only has two PCI-E expansion slots and eight internal drive bays, which limits your overall I/O capacity and performance.

Dell PowerEdge R520
This model server has a 2U form factor, two processor sockets, and uses Intel Xeon E5-2400 series processors. It also has twelve memory slots (192GB total RAM with 16GB DIMMs), has eight 3.5 inch drive bays, and has three PCI-E 3.0 x8 and one PCI-E 3.0 x16 expansion slots. It has a total of eight, twelve, or sixteen physical cores for SQL Server 2012 core licensing purposes. It has a total of sixteen, 24, or 32 logical cores with Intel hyper-threading enabled. This model is also a bad choice for SQL Server 2012 since it uses the same Intel Xeon E5-2400 series processor as the R420 . It does have four PCI-E expansion slots, which is a little better for I/O capacity and performance. Still, I would steer clear of both the R420 and R520 models for SQL Server 2012 usage.

Dell PowerEdge R620
This model server has a 1U form factor, two processor sockets, and uses Intel Xeon E5-2600 series processors. It has 24 memory slots (384GB total RAM with 16GB DIMMs), has ten 2.5 inch drive bays, and has one PCI-E 3.0 x8 and two PCI-E 3.0 x16 expansion slots. It also has a total of eight, twelve, or sixteen physical cores for SQL Server 2012 core licensing purposes. It has a total of sixteen, 24, or 32 logical cores with Intel hyper-threading enabled. The R620 is a much better choice for SQL Server 2012 than either the R420 or R520 since it uses the Intel Xeon E5-2600 series Sandy Bridge-EP processor. That processor series gives you higher clock speeds, higher memory bandwidth, and higher memory capacity compared to the Xeon E5-2400 series Sandy Bridge-EN processor. The R620 is limited to three PCI-E expansion slots, but it does have ten internal drive bays. Overall, it is a good model for use as an entry level two-socket database server, especially if you want a 1U form factor.

Dell PowerEdge R720
This model server has a 2U form factor, two processor sockets, and uses Intel Xeon E5-2600 series processors. It has 24 memory slots (384GB total RAM with 16GB DIMMs), has sixteen 2.5 inch drive bays, and has six PCI-E 3.0 x8 and one PCI-E 3.0 x16 expansion slots. It has a total of eight, twelve, or sixteen physical cores for SQL Server 2012 core licensing purposes. Total of sixteen, 24, or 32 logical cores with Intel hyper-threading enabled. The R720 is one of my favorite models in the Dell 12th generation line. It uses the same Intel Xeon E5-2600 series processor as the R620, but it has seven PCI-E expansion slots and sixteen internal drive bays, which combine to give you a lot of potential I/O capacity and performance. It does cost a little bit more than the R620, and it is in a 2U vertical size, so there are some scenarios where I would prefer an R620. An example scenario would be an OLTP workload where I knew that I would have external SAN storage with very good random I/O performance, and I wanted to be able to use 1U database servers instead of 2U database servers.

Dell PowerEdge R720xd
This model server has a 2U form factor, two processor sockets, uses Intel Xeon E5-2600 series processors, has 24 memory slots (384GB total RAM with 16GB DIMMs), has 26 2.5 inch drive bays, and has four PCI-E 3.0 x8 and two PCI-E 3.0 x16 expansion slots. Has a total of eight, twelve, or sixteen physical cores for SQL Server 2012 core licensing purposes. Total of sixteen, 24, or 32 logical cores with Intel hyper-threading enabled. The R720xd is similar to the R720, except that it has 26 internal drive bays and only six PCI-E expansion slots. This model could be a good choice if you can run your I/O workload on 26 internal drive bays, some or all of which could be solid state drives (SSDs). This could let you avoid the expense of an external direct-attached storage (DAS) enclosure or a storage area network (SAN).

Dell PowerEdge R820
This model server has a 2U form factor, four processor sockets, and uses Intel Xeon E5-4600 series processors. It has 48 memory slots (768GB total RAM with 16GB DIMMs), has sixteen 2.5 inch drive bays, and has five PCI-E 3.0 x8 and two PCI-E 3.0 x16 expansion slots. It also has a total of sixteen, 24, or 32 physical cores for SQL Server 2012 core licensing purposes. Total of 32, 48, or 64 logical cores with Intel hyper-threading enabled. The R820 has four processor sockets in a 2U vertical size. It uses the Intel Xeon E5-4600 series processor, which has lower clock speeds than the Xeon E5-2600 series. There is also some non-uniform memory access (NUMA) scaling loss as you move from a two-socket to a four-socket server, i.e. a four socket server does not have twice the scalability as a two socket server with the exact same processor. The R820 does have sixteen internal drive bays and seven PCI-E expansion slots, so it has good I/O capacity and performance potential. It also has twice the total RAM capacity compared to an R620, R720, or R720xd. In spite of all these factors, I would tend to prefer two R720xd servers instead of one R820 server, assuming you can split your workload between two servers. You would have faster, less expensive processors, over three times as many internal drive bays, and nearly twice as many PCI-E expansion slots, while paying the same SQL Server 2012 license costs. I really like the R720xd, with its 26 internal drive bays. I suspect that a very high percentage of SQL Server workloads would run extremely well on an R720xd. If 26 internal drives did not give you enough I/O performance and capacity, you could always add some internal solid state storage cards or use some form of external storage.

As a database professional, I would be actively lobbying against using the R420 or R520 models, since they have the entry-level Intel Xeon E5-2400 series processors, which have lower clock speeds and less memory bandwidth compared to the Intel Xeon E5-2600 series processors that are used in the R620, R720, and R720xd. They also have half of the total memory capacity and far fewer PCI-E slots compared to the higher end models. They are a little less expensive, but the hardware cost delta is very small compared to the SQL Server 2012 license costs. Remember, you are paying for SQL Server 2012 core licenses based on physical core counts, so you want to get the best package you can as far as the rest of the server goes. One nice fact is that the Intel Xeon E5 processor family is available in four-core, six-core, and eight core models, with specific four-core models having higher base clock speeds than the “top-of-the line” eight-core model processor. If you wanted to minimize your SQL Server 2012 core-based licensing costs and were willing to give up some scalability and capacity, you could pick one of these faster base clock speed four-core model processors for your server and actually see very good single-threaded performance.

A good example of a fast, quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor is the Intel Xeon E5-2643 that runs at a base clock speed of 3.3GHz, with a Turbo Boost speed of 3.5GHz. This processor would give very good OLTP performance at 50% the SQL Server 2012 Core license cost of an eight-core Intel Xeon E5-2690 that runs at a base clock speed of 2.9GHz, with a Turbo Boost speed of 3.8GHz.

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RunAs Radio has been putting out weekly podcasts since April of 2007, and they have a lot of good content available there! Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp did RunAs Radio #221 back in July 2011. Paul also did RunAs Radio #74 and RunAs Radio #72.

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