The lab results are in – Principled Technologies’ report on Dell Active System 800

Editor's Note: Below is a guest post from Steve Stover, Director, Product Management and Strategy for Enterprise Systems and Solutions. Here's his post.

I hear it from IT teams every day – they’re looking to consolidate multiple high-performance applications and workloads onto a single infrastructure, but they are painfully familiar with the scalability and resource management challenges that often come along with it.

To get the job done right, IT administrators need to know how many users can simultaneously run what number and type of applications on a system, and they need to be able to accurately predict and easily deploy additional resources within the infrastructure as end user requirements evolve.  Being able to count on this scalability is a key element for future-proofing IT infrastructure.

Dell gets that, and we designed the Active System 800 as a simple and scalable pre-integrated platform that combines servers, storage, networking and unified management to run heterogeneous workloads. But we don’t expect customers to just read the spec sheets. We recently commissioned lab tests to be conducted by benchmarking firm Principled Technologies so that IT teams can get independent insights into the performance and scalability of the Active System 800. 

The Principled Technologies report found two key findings:

  • The Dell Active System 800 is ready and capable of supporting enterprises of up to 900 users running five types of applications – VDI, email, Web collaboration, user collaboration and order processing.
  • The Dell Active System 800 can easily scale to drive the needs of 1,800 users running these enterprise workloads.

Here’s a more detailed analysis of the findings and how it translates to business benefits:

  • Using just eight Dell PowerEdge M620 servers, the Dell Active System 800 supported 900 simultaneous users running five different applications with excellent response times and sufficient headroom. 
  • Even with 100 percent growth from 900 – 1,800 users, the Dell Active System 800's scalability provided the flexibility to expand capacity by doubling the PowerEdge M620 nodes and adding two storage arrays. 
  • The tests concluded that the Dell Active System 800 offers data center managers a converged platform to consolidate multi-user multi-application workloads, which has the potential to reduce data center costs as the number of servers, network fabrics and storage arrays decrease.  
  • The Dell Active System 800 enables data center managers to better plan for infrastructure growth and budgetary needs. Even as a business continues to grow, the Dell Active System 800 delivers predictable scalability in a converged manner – adding resources and seeing linear increases in capacity.  
  • For users, these results mean that they can complete daily tasks and use their virtual desktop sessions without sacrificing performance or resource availability.

If you’re evaluating converged infrastructure solutions, be sure to check out the facts. You can review the complete Principled Technologies findings by going to the report

About the Author: Lani Dame