Dell Research Report Sample

Dell Inc. commissioned Principled Technologies to measure the DNS performance of the following two servers running the Sun Solaris operating system:

• Dell PowerEdge R900 running BIND 9.3.4-P1 on Solaris 10
• Sun Fire V440 running BIND 8.3.3 on Solaris 9

Our goal was to compare a typical existing installation with a typical new purchase configuration, so we could analyze what customers might experience if they were staying with Solaris and its bundled BIND DNS server software, but were migrating from RISC to x86. Our goal was not to achieve maximum performance, but rather to focus on the performance typical of such a real-world scenario. We selected a common system configuration for an existing Sun environment -- a 3-year-old Sun Fire v440 with 32 GB of RAM and all of its disk drive bays full (four 73GB 10K drives) -- and compared it to a moderate configuration of a new six-core Intel Xeon 7400 series-based Dell PowerEdge R900 server with 64 GB of RAM.