Dell vs Cisco – New Tolly Report (updated)

UPDATED – Tolly Enterprises recently published a new Tolly Report comparing Dell PowerEdge FX2 with Cisco UCS showing results favoring Dell.  The 17 page document provides background on each of the product architectures and tests them in four test cases. 

The four test cases were:

  • 32VM’s moving from Enclosure 1/Node 1 to Enclosure 2/Node 1 with only VMmark traffic present
  • 32VM’s moving from Enclosure 1/Node 1 to Enclosure 2 /Node 1 with additional NetPerf injected traffic present
  • 128VM’s moving from Enclosure 1/Nodes 1-2-3-4 to Enclosure 2/Nodes 1-2-3-4 with only VMmark traffic present
  • 128VM’s moving from Enclosure 1/Nodes 1-2-3-4 to Enclosure 2/Nodes 1-2-3-4 with additional NetPerf injected traffic present

A “tile” of 8 VMs were used to represent the HP application.  This consisted of four web servers, two database servers, an SMTP server, and an idle VM.  A ninth VM acts as a client for all workloads and was placed on a separate physical host for both environments.

The outcome favored Cisco when migrations were performed without background traffic, but favored Dell when background traffic was present.  Below is a couple of the findings.  For the full report, please download the document here.

Tolly Report - FX2 vs UCS - figure 4

Tolly Report - FX2 vs UCS - figure 5

 

 

Tolly Report - FX2 vs UCS - table 1
Tolly Report - FX2 vs UCS - table 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin Houston - Founder, BladesMadeSimple.com

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 18 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.  Kevin has worked at Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global Enterprise market since August 2011.

 

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