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World Wide Technology’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC) is a collaborative ecosystem where WWT experts, customers and partners can explore, evaluate and educate themselves on integrated architectural solutions that accelerate digital transformation and help solve business challenges. Recently the ATC has experienced a significant increase in customer requests with SQL 2019 due to Microsoft ending support on their SQL 2005, SQL 2008, and SQL 2008 R2 products this past year. Customers are particularly interested in comparing 2-socket servers, 4-socket servers and servers integrated with Intel Optane solutions. These requests lead the ATC team to build an environment that combines these options into one solution. The environment includes an SQL 2019 workload, HammerDB for load generation, 2-socket blade (MX740c) and 4-socket blade (MX840c) solutions from Dell’s MX7000 kinetic blade infrastructure, Dell’s PowerMax Array and Intel Optane PMem.

We are back with some new automation use cases for you to read about! And we are turning this into a series of ATC Insights (volumes) dedicated to exposing different automation techniques we use in the Advanced Technology Center (ATC).

A customer came to the ATC in search of an answer to a question "What is the effect on power consumption when enabling the Intel Turbo Boost feature on Dell and HPE servers of various hardware configurations?" The answer to this question is something that we at the ATC have been wondering as well. We expected the turbo would increase the power consumption but how much and would the results change by vendor? To answer these questions we utilized a tool called BurnInTest to put a consistent load on the servers. We recorded the results using Emerson PDUs reporting in SolarWinds at 1 minute intervals. We also compared the data collected to the onboard power utilities in Dell's iDRAC and HPE's iLO as a second data point. Curiosity drove another question, "Do the onboard consoles of these platforms report power accurately?" The answers to these questions may surprise you, they certainly surprised us.