SolutionOriented Blog

We’ve been challenged to backup our comparison of Nehalem-EP systems to Opteron Shanghai in price performance based on prevailing VMmark scores available on VMware’s site. In earlier posts, our analysis predicted “comparable” price-performance results between Shanghai and Nehalem-EP systems based on the economics of today’s memory and processors availability:

• Shanghai Economics 101
• Shanghai Economics 101 – Continued
• Shanghai Economics 101 – Conclusion

So what we’ve done here is taken the on-line configurations of some of the benchmark competitors. To make things very simple, we’ve just configured memory and CPU as tested – no HBA or 10GE cards to skew the results. The only exception – as pointed out by our challenger – is that we’ve taken the option of using “street price” memory where “street price” is better than the server manufacturer’s memory price.

Here’s our line-up:

Here we see Dell offering very aggressive DDR3/1066 pricing [for the R710] allowing us to go with on-line configurations, and HP offering overly expensive DDR2/667 memory prices (factor of 2) forcing us to go with 3rd party memory. In fact, IBM did not allow us to configure their memory configuration – as tested [with the 3650M2] – with their on-line configuration tool [neither did Dell with the M610] so we had to apply street memory prices. [Note: the So here’s how they rank with respect to VMmark:

As you can easily see, the cost-per-tile (analogous to $/VM) favors the Shanghai systems. In fact, the one system that we’ve taken criticism for including in our previous comparisons – the Supermicro 6026T-NTR+ with 72GB of DDR3/1066 (running at DDR3/800) – actually leads the pack in Nehalem-EP $/tile, but we’ve excluded it from our tables since it has been argued to be a “sub-optimal” configuration and out-lier. Again, the sweet spot for price-performance for Nehalem, Shanghai and Istanbul is in the 48GB to 80GB range with inexpensive memory: simple economics.

Please note, that not one of the 2P VMmark scores listed on VMware’s official VMmark results tally carry the Opteron 2393SE version of the processor (3.1GHz) or HT3-enabled motherboards. It is likely that we’ll not see HT3-enabled scores nor 2P ESX 4.0 scores until Istanbul’s release in the coming month. Again, if Shanghai’s $/tile is competitive with Nehalem’s today (again, in the 48GB to 80GB configurations), Istanbul – with the same memory and system costs – will be even more so.

Update: AMD’s Margaret Lewis has a similar take with comparison prices for AMD using DDR2/533 configurations. Her numbers – like our previous posts – resolve to $/VM, however she provides some good “street prices” for more “mainstream” configurations of Intel Nehalem-EP and AMD Shanghai systems. See her results and conclusions on AMD’s blog.