If your organization is like many small or medium-sized businesses (SMBs), you’ve had to make tough decisions due to the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two and a half years. Perhaps you expanded to new markets or moved more of your business online. Maybe you also opted to delay technology upgrades due to the general uncertainty of the times. But now that your business has adapted and conditions have stabilized, you may be considering making a hardware purchase to better support your company. It may suit your business interests to invest in a server solution that can handle more ecommerce orders, provide better support for Kubernetes clusters, or deliver stronger web app performance. Throughout the upgrade process, you have a number of decisions to navigate.

Upgrade considerations

When it is time to upgrade, selecting a server solution can be complicated. You don’t want to overinvest in technologies with capabilities that don’t match your workloads. On the other hand, upfront costs aren’t everything—a suboptimal solution “might not be powerful or reliable enough to handle mission-critical workloads,” and could deliver a poor experience to both customers and employees.¹ Such a solution could have a shorter lifecycle, which would require additional investments in hardware and licensing costs, as well as IT resources, when it’s necessary to upgrade again. Taking the time to assess your current and future needs—such as the types of workloads you run, the number of customers and employees you support, and the growth you anticipate—can help you select a hardware solution that will suit your needs for years to come.

Any business must take a variety of concerns into account, but SMBs face a unique set of challenges: Timing, budgets, limited IT resources, and the search for suitable solutions are some of the many factors your organization must consider when upgrading.

What we’re testing

In the PT data center, we are running a mixed workload that reflects some of the post-pandemic requirements your organization might be experiencing as you move into this next phase of your business operations. The workload includes an online transactional database (OLTP) component, a multi-tier web app on Kubernetes, and a WordPress component, each running simultaneously to simulate an organization using a single cluster of four servers to meet multiple needs. To understand the performance improvements you could expect a newer solution to deliver over the solution you’re using today, we will run the workload on two different Microsoft Windows Server 2022 clusters with Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct:

• four latest-gen 16G Dell PowerEdge servers powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors
• four previous-generation 15G Dell PowerEdge servers

When testing concludes, we will publish the number of OLTP orders per minute and WordPress requests per second that each cluster supported simultaneously. We will also publish Weathervane test results for the 16G Dell PowerEdge sever cluster’s Kubernetes performance in WvUsers, a metric that represents “the maximum number of simulated users that could interact with the application instances without violating the QoS requirement.”² The report will include complete information on our test environment, workloads, and configurations.

Conclusion

As the post-pandemic economy grows, your organization may benefit from a server solution that can keep digital transactions running smoothly, sustain the websites for your business, and natively support Kubernetes containers. When our testing concludes with the mixed workload that reflects these needs, our forthcoming report will detail the performance you may be able to expect from a cluster of 16G Dell PowerEdge powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors compared to a cluster of legacy 15G Dell PowerEdge servers.