Next-gen Dell PowerEdge Servers Upgrade IT

Dell PowerEdge:

Organizations that switch to new server technology must carefully weigh the advantages and disadvantages of investing in new infrastructure, including hardware, software, and the operating environment. Think about the performance improvements a data center would see with this new or updated gear and software. Organizations will benefit from the most recent security protection, system management tools, processing speed improvements, decreased downtime, and quicker results in addition to increased raw performance. A modernized infrastructure will also increase scalability to smoothly accommodate future growth and boost cluster performance per watt.

All of this suggests that modernizing your hardware, software, and operating system may enhance your data center’s overall performance. However, it can be difficult to align all three aspects at once because earlier choices might impede development.

Express Storage Architecture (ESA)-based vSAN 8.0 is an improved ReadyNode infrastructure offering from Dell, Intel, and VMware. Improved performance and efficiency are provided by this release to cater to the changing business needs of clients.

Customers who use Dell’s PowerEdge R760 server can take advantage of vSAN 8.0, but they must choose between upgrading to the new ESA ReadyNode architecture or staying with the current vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) Ready Node. x86 servers that have been pre-configured, examined, and approved by Dell and VMware are known as vSAN ESA ReadyNodes. Every vSAN ESA ReadyNode is ideally configured with the necessary amount of CPU, memory, network IO, and storage NVMe devices for vSAN ESA or OSA. Dell has more than 250 configurations in total to meet all customer needs, raising the questions of which one to pick and how to migrate.

To gain a complete grasp of performance and use case characteristics, engineers from Intel and Dell examined several vSAN products. Between November 2022 and March 2023, the tests were carried out in Intel and Dell performance labs with NVMe drives made by Solidigm. The ultimate objective was to determine how much faster vSAN 8.0 ESA performed over the prior vSAN 7.0U3 OSA design over several generations of various hardware. The testing employing the most recent Dell servers and 4th generation Intel Xeon Processors with increased PCIe bandwidth and improved network capabilities showed over 6x higher performance and up to 4.9x lower latency.

The majority of users will be switching to the ESA on a per-cluster basis through a new installation of vSAN running on vSAN ReadyNodes approved for usage with the ESA because the vSAN 8 ESA storage framework has more strict hardware requirements than OSA. The OSA to ESA conversion is a one-time migration that takes place for each cluster. Every action needs to be well thought out, taking into account things like hardware replacement, data migration, performance advantages, and available capacity in other clusters.

Ultimately, lowering total cost of ownership (TCO), decreasing downtime, and boosting performance and scalability via optimizing infrastructure are the main duties of IT teams. Engineers at Dell, Intel, and VMware are concentrating on optimizing new solutions to provide consumers with more value as technology continues to advance. This value may be at danger or perhaps eliminated when new technologies are implemented in legacy systems.

The most recent VMware hypervisor/vSAN ReadyNodes, along with Dell PowerEdge servers equipped with 4th generation Intel Xeon processors, may significantly boost performance, lower latency, and offer more immediate business insights. Reconfiguring current hardware to maximize the possibilities of vSAN8.0 ESA necessitates a considerable capital outlay because storage devices account for a significant amount of TCO. However, because of the diminished performance of servers and legacy NVMe, servers will still be unable to give their maximum performance. The workload for the current IT employees is also greatly increased by this strategy.