Dell EMC Azure Stack HCI Series Performance Review
Dell Technologies offers a wide suite of options for organizations that want to deploy Dell EMC Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI. Core to this offering are Dell EMC’s productized solution – AX nodes- that are validated and certified to run Azure Stack HCI. In addition, Dell EMC has a robust number of validated offerings across three different node types in the solution catalog. This depth of offerings gives customers choice and flexibility in their Azure Stack HCI deployments.
On this page contains a video below that will show you the performance of the Dell EMC Azure Stack HCI Series.
More On Dell EMC Azure Stack HCI Series
An all-in-one, validated HCI system that leverages an intelligently integrated foundation from Dell Technologies to deliver simple, but proven, enterprise-class deployment, maintenance and support experience.
Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI delivers a cloud consumption experience on-premises while maintaining data security and full-stack lifecycle management. With simplified and automated operations customers can complete complex tasks in a fraction of the time and free IT organizations to focus on higher business value projects. Dell Technologies offers multiple configuration options of hardware that have been validated and guaranteed to deliver the optimal balance of performance and capacity to address Azure Stack HCI technical use cases and workloads. For instance the AX-640 mainly is performance and density optimized while the AX-740xd (one shown in the video) is performance and storage optimized. Read more in Dell’s solution brief document.
How is the IOPS Test Conducted?
The test in the video was conducted with the help of a tool called VMFleet. VMFleet is a collection of scripts that enables to deploy virtual machines which perform I/O to stress the underlying storage system. To achieve I/O, the VMs leverages DiskSpd which is a Microsoft tool.
VMfleet is a storage load generator to stress your S2D. It basically burns your disks/cpu/storage network to check whether S2D is stable or not. VMFleet is also used to get performance results of S2D storage subsystem. In more depth it is used to analyze performance work by allowing the engineer to simulate a real world situation. It utilizes a set of scripts found on GitHub that utilizes diskspd for testing and validation of performance on HCI clusters.
As noticed we have achieved an impressed IOPS of 604K via 2 x AX-720xd nodes. The AX-740xd is a dual-socket 2U node that was designed to find the balance between capacity, performance and cost for HCI workloads. It can be configured with 96GB to 1.5TB of RAM and 3 to
192TB of storage.
Concluding Thoughts
To help users onboard these technologies quickly, Dell EMC offers a numerous validated solutions that leverage their wide HCI, Servers, Networking and Data Protection portfolio. The benefits are evident as shown in the video, and while many are engineering-related and hard to see, the integration Dell EMC has with Windows Admin Center is one that truly shines. The connection here between Dell EMC’s existing server management tools and those provided by Microsoft are deeper than anything we’ve seen.
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