How do you go about comparing two servers in order to figure out how many of one, you could replace with a newer one?

Question

How do you go about comparing two servers in order to figure out how many of one, you could replace with a newer one?

In particular, I have the following

Old server: ProLiant BL460c G6 (1.86 GHz, Intel Xeon E5502) New server: ProLiant BL460c Gen9 (1.80 GHz, Intel Xeon E5-2630L v3)

I can go onto CPU benchmarking website and compare the CPUs http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp%5B%5D=1238&cmp%5B%5D=2818 (for a direct comparison) https://www.spec.org/cgi-bin/osgresults (for benchnmark)

However, I am not sure how to be able to say that my G6s can be replaced by x G9s? How do I factor in core count and memory? Anyone know a smart way of doing this, or any other metrics to use?

Answer 1

Before doing any sort of benchmark you should do an analysis of the most common workloads to be run on the servers. Determine if they are CPU, Memory, I/O(disk) or I/O(network) bound. This can be done through a variety of methods. Once you understand these requirements look for specific benchmarks that test these aspects of system performance. The iozone benchmark is used to test file systems, stream can be used to test memory bandwidth, and there are a variety of others.

For pure CPU workload the High-Performance Linpack(HPL) is widely used to test pure floating point operations per second(FLOPS). For single node tests any BLAS workload that uses over 75% of the memory on the system can be used to get a pretty good idea of CPU performance