Demartek Evaluation of HP ProLiant Gen8 vs Gen9 Server Blades

14 July 2015

Information Technology (IT) organizations face increasing demands on their infrastructure in order to support business growth. In September of 2014, HP introduced its new line of HP ProLiant BladeSystem Gen9 Server Blades with the goal of improving the price/performance ratio of data center computing to empower the data-driven enterprise. These new servers take advantage of the new Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors, DDR4 Smart Memory, and improved Virtual Connect FlexFabric 20Gb. This allows HP to deliver an infrastructure that meets IT needs for a more service driven platform. The HP ProLiant BladeSystem Gen9 Server Blades are purpose-built for enterprise workloads such as virtualization and cloud computing, delivering lower cost, faster time, and higher value of service delivery. These next generation blades are specifically focused on ensuring that there is a close match between the application being run, the environment in which it is running, and the business outputs being sought.

When IT Managers consider upgrading older generation HP hardware or purchasing new hardware to help manage the increased demands of their datacenters, they want to know that the next generation offers solid, measurable performance to drive business improvements.

With this in mind, HP commissioned Demartek to compare Gen8 and Gen9 performance of their HP ProLiant BL460c Server Blades using a Data Warehousing workload. The workload was chosen to provide comparative information as a decision support vehicle. It consists of a suite of business oriented ad-hoc queries and concurrent data modifications. The queries and the data populating the database have been chosen to have broad industry-wide relevance. This workload illustrates decision support systems that examine large volumes of data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and give answers to critical business questions. Two variations of data warehousing workloads were run: a single sequence of queries and then a set of streamed multiple query sequences concurrently.

Other Reports in this Series

Demartek also published a separate evaluation of the HP ProLiant Gen9 vs Gen8 and G7 Server Blades in September 2015.

View the Demartek Evaluation of HP ProLiant Gen8 vs Gen9 Server Blades
(PDF, 2312 KB)