Executive Summary
It’s no exaggeration to say that virtualized infrastructure is ubiquitous. According to one study, more than 92 percent of businesses
in North America and Europe rely on server-virtualization technology.¹ However, the workloads that are run in those virtualized
environments, and the types of businesses that run those workloads, can vary dramatically. Small to medium-sized businesses
(SMBs) often host a wide mix of server workloads on a single, reliable server. Businesses of all sizes host database workloads on
virtual machines (VMs). And some businesses, such as healthcare organizations, might serve virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to
users from a single, efficient physical server.
Because of this variety of use cases, organizations might struggle to find useful performance metrics they can relate to their own
environments. As a result, many organizations turn to industry-standard benchmarks to simplify the evaluation process prior to
making a spending decision. Benchmarks can provide valuable insights, provided they are evaluated in the right way.
In order to investigate the relationship between high benchmark performance and potential business value in the real world, Prowess
Consulting dug deeper into what strong showings in industry benchmarks can mean for businesses deploying world-record servers.
Because of its outsized market share and the number of world records Dell Technologies holds across a variety of benchmarks, we
specifically looked at Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers.
World-Record Power-Performance Results for Virtualization Workloads
