Introduction:
COVID-19 forced many small or medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to make changes, such as shifting to new markets or moving portions of their business online. Given the overall mood of uncertainty during the pandemic, some companies chose to delay technology purchases. Supply chain issues also affected the availability of some hardware. As conditions have stabilized, however, decision makers may be looking at the legacy gear in their data centers and questioning its ability to meet current requirements.
When upgrading, purchasers have a choice between investing in the latestgeneration hardware or trying to reduce their capital expenditure (CAPEX) by going with previous-generation gear. To help those in this position understand the implications of both options, Principled Technologies conducted a series of tests on two three-node Microsoft Windows Server 2022 clusters with Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct. One cluster used previous-generation singlesocket 15G Dell™ PowerEdge™ R7515 servers powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC 7543P processors; the other used latest-generation single- socket 16G Dell PowerEdge R7615 servers powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC™ 9354P processors along with Broadcom® network interface cards (NICs) and PERC 11 storage controllers. We measured each cluster’s capabilities by making it simultaneously handle a database workload, a container-based application, and a web app—a mix of workloads similar to the ones that many SMBs run.