HP DL980 CUSTOMER CHRONICLESJuly 2011

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Contents

Introduction ............................................................4 About the HP ProLiant DL980 Server ...........................5HP ProLiant DL980 Use Cases ...................................6Major U.S. Retailer ..................................................7 Global Communication Services Enterprise ................10 Financial Services Bureau ....................................... 11 Healthcare Institution ..............................................14 Global System Integrator ........................................16Conclusion ...........................................................19

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IntroductionSince first introduced to the market, the next-generation HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Servers have been put to the test by demanding IT managers worldwide. Regardless of industry, IT managers must lower costs and continually keep pace with their company’s business growth, and are seeking alternatives to corporate legacy infrastructure. Customers doing evaluations of the DL980 are having a very positive experience. By comparing the DL980’s performance to competitive offerings, customers have found that the DL980 can handle their most demanding workloads at a fraction of the cost of maintaining their legacy environments. This document is a compilation of five early customer evaluations of the DL980 from 2010 to 2011—all documented to demonstrate the significant business benefits customers have received by migrating to the new generation DL980 servers. Based on information from HP account teams, we eliminated customer names and any proprietary information to maintain the privacy of our clients.

We have created the DL980 Customer Chronicles to save you time and effort in planning your next DL980 deployment. Leverage these insights from your peers who have successfully evaluated DL980s in similar environments as yours. The experiences that are shared in these stories may spark ideas on ways you can deploy the DL980 in your demanding environment. The detailed use cases demonstrate the DL980’s capabilities in situations where revenue and reputation were on the line, and where it was vital to meet service-level agreements (SLAs). In many cases, HP had to solve thorny technical challenges as well.

In reading the document, you’ll learn about the technical superiority of the DL980 servers as well as the talent and teamwork of a range of groups involved in these stories. They include HP Business Critical Sales Specialists, Worldwide Presales teams, HP Cupertino and Grenoble Solution Centers, HP SAP and Microsoft Engineering, HP Elite Value-Added Resellers, and HP Technology Services. In the end, the customers chose HP for two reasons: DL980’s performance results and HP’s collaborative approach. Customers felt that HP understood their business and had their best interests at heart, and were not just responding to an RFP.

Building on these real-world scenarios, you can deploy the DL980 in your company’s own demanding environment with confidence. Best of all, you’ll be leveraging the insights from your peers who confirm the prowess of the HP ProLiant DL980.

INTRODUCTION

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About the HP ProLiant DL980 ServerBlending business-critical and industry-standard design principles, the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Server is an 8-socket, x86-based server designed with balanced scalability, self-healing resiliency, and breakthrough efficiencies for the largest and most demanding enterprise-class workloads.

Ideal environments

This G7 server—HP’s flagship scale-up x86 server model—is the right choice for enterprise-class databases, in-memory databases, I/O and memory-intensive applications, consolidation, and large virtualization environments that need:

Extreme performance with linear scalability•Advanced resiliency•Consolidation and virtualization flexibility and efficiencies•Easy integration and management capabilities, with all the familiar industry-leading ProLiant tools and •accessories

Key features

Intel• ® Xeon® Processor E7 family and 7500 series, with up to 10 cores per CPU, provide the performance required for demanding scale-up applications and virtualization environments.128 DIMM slots provide for maximum system capacity of 2TB of memory—with flexible expansion in the •future up to 4TB (with 32GB DIMMs).Highly expandable CPU, memory, and I/O capacity allow you to use computing resources efficiently. HP •scalable design supports up to eight processors, 80 processor cores, and 160 logical processors, as well as 128 DDR3 DIMM slots for a maximum memory of 2TB (with the capability of 4TB in the future).Up to 16 I/O slots support the most I/O-intensive applications.•

INTRODUCTION

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HP ProLiant DL980 Use Cases Changing the platform that hosts a critical enterprise application can have significant consequences. Therefore, many enterprise IT managers want to see ‘proof’ that the new platform meets or exceeds their specifications before they decide to make that shift.

The following five stories demonstrate how successful companies are choosing HP’s DL980 over formidable competitive alternatives with confidence. In every case, the DL980 demonstrates its ability to deliver the scalability, self-healing resiliency, and efficiencies needed for the most-demanding workloads.

Use Case #1: Major U.S. retailer

This long-time IBM customer decided to retire its mainframe in favor of x86 servers running Microsoft Windows. The issue? Could the IBM DB2 database software be moved successfully to the ProLiant DL980 server? The DL980 with Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server proved it could surpass the firm’s legacy database performance by almost 58% on average, making it a better solution for their SAP® environment. See page 7.

Use Case #2: Global communications services company

Oracle pitched the Oracle Exadata system—calling it a perfect fit as a Sun SPARC 6900 replacement. The company’s IT management was unconvinced and turned to HP for an alternative. The DL980 hit all its performance, scalability, and reliability targets and proved that it delivers a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than the Oracle Exadata appliance. See page 10.

Use Case #3: Financial services bureau

In benchmark tests, the Oracle Exadata system easily outperformed the current Sun platform. However, the IT group had concerns about the inflexibility of the Exadata architecture and invited HP to bid. In some rigorous testing at the Cupertino Solutions Center, the DL980 and Violin Flash Memory Arrays outperformed Oracle Exadata conclusively—sealing the customer’s decision to go with the DL980 solution. See page 11.

Use Case #4: Healthcare institution

To host a critical patient information database, IBM proposed a mainframe solution. The IBM platform turned out to be a costly, and time-consuming mistake, so the customer asked HP to bid. During a comprehensive evaluation, the DL980 outperformed the IBM servers in responsiveness and met all the customer’s requirements for performance, reliability, and scalability at a fraction of the cost. See page 14.

Use Case #5: Global system integrator

The system integrator had to deliver a service that relied on a huge, multi-terabyte database platform. IBM was pushing the customer to adopt the IBM System x3850 X5 and x3950 X5 servers. An HP test convinced the customer that the DL980 could match the IBM performance and scale to accommodate the anticipated growth in users. See page 16.

INTRODUCTION

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MAJOR U.S. RETAILER

Major U.S. Retailer Retailer shelves IBM, stocks up on HP ProLiant DL980 Servers and Microsoft SQL Server for SAP® application environment

Concerns about SQL Server performance For most of the company’s business-critical applications, the shift to the x86 platform was straightforward and involved little risk. However, the IBM DB2 database was a stumbling block. The retailer’s mission-critical SAP environment depended on more than 16TB of information stored in the DB2 database. IBM does not offer DB2 for Windows, so changing to x86 hardware and Windows meant migrating to Microsoft SQL Server for database services. Some members of the company’s IT staff were skeptical and questioned SQL Server’s performance and reliability compared to DB2 on the mainframe.

The staff had questions about the actual database migration. How long would it take? What unforeseen problems would arise? At the same time, IBM urged the company to stay with DB2 and offered aggressive pricing on two proposed IBM platforms. Before moving to SQL Server and x86 hardware for this critical environment, the IT group needed proof that the migration would make sense from a performance and economic standpoint.

Challenging targetsThe retailer laid out a battery of 19 benchmark tests reflecting real-world operations such as nightly batch runs, typical user queries, and simulated customer traffic to the website. HP had to show that the proposed HP/Microsoft platform could equal or outperform the mainframe environment.

As a first step, HP and Microsoft consultants analyzed the current DB2/SAP environment in detail, using that information to develop specifications for the DL980 platform. The HP Solution Center in Cupertino, California, provisioned a test bed consisting of HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Servers running Windows Server 2008 R2. HP and Microsoft consultants loaded Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, along with SAP ECC and Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse (BI/DW) modules. The test featured a snapshot of the SAP production database, scrubbed to remove identifying information on the retailer’s customers.

Matching DB2 mainframe performanceThe first test results were conclusive, even before performance tuning: HP ProLiant DL980 Servers running Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server matched or beat the mainframe numbers in every case. With tuning, the results were even more impressive, showing that the proposed solution surpassed legacy database performance by almost 58% on average (See Table 1 for test results). After carefully scrutinizing the test results, the retailer’s IT group was convinced that the HP/Microsoft platform met their performance needs.

Situation:Like many large enterprises, this retailer—a long-time IBM customer—had decided to retire its mainframe in favor of x86 servers running the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 operating system. The retailer’s goals were to lower overall cost and improve the return on its IT infrastructure investments.

Objective:Demonstrate that Microsoft SQL Server running on HP ProLiant DL980 Servers can match or exceed the performance of a legacy IBM mainframe running IBM DB2 software. Show that HP and Microsoft have the experience and expertise to manage the SAP data migration from DB2 to SQL Server.

Approach:•Analyzedthelegacyenvironmentanddevelopedtest

specifications

•BuiltthetestenvironmentinHPSolutionCenterinCupertino

•Migratedtestdatafromtheproductiondatabase

•Performedevaluationtests

•Enhancedserverandsoftwareconfigurationsandrepeattests

Results:•Reducedbenchmarktesttimebyanaverageof57.6%

•AchievedcompressionratiocomparabletoIBMDB2

•Discoveredpreviouslyunknowndatabaseandprogramming inconsistencies

•MaintainedstrongcollaborationbetweenHP,Microsoft,and the customer

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Data migration, the deciding factorThe biggest challenge the customer faced was migrating the data. Over years of operation, inconsistencies had crept into the database—a common problem for IT groups under constant pressure and time constraints to make the system work. There were program code problems due to a lack of programming standards and ever-changing group of developers working on the project. As the HP/Microsoft team imported the data into the SQL Server environment, they remedied those issues on the fly and documented them for the retailer’s IT group. Those actions showed that the HP/Microsoft team was more than capable of managing the migration from DB2 to SQL Server. In fact, early DL980 testing advanced the actual database migration.

Comparable data compression When the IBM sales team touted the advantages of DB2, they frequently pointed to DB2’s “superior compression capabilities.” The retailer’s IT group was pleasantly surprised to learn that Microsoft SQL Server could provide about the same level of data compression as IBM DB2.

Decision reaps rewardsUpon completion of the customer’s evaluation, the retailer’s IT group chose the HP/Microsoft solution (See Figure 1 for the installed environment). The client was convinced of the relative performance of the HP/Microsoft platform versus the mainframe, and there was high confidence that the HP/Microsoft team had the necessary competence in SQL Server and SAP to manage the migration successfully. The retailer is moving forward with its aggressive plans, confident that its SAP environment will support the anticipated growth—and that HP and Microsoft will be there every step of the way.

Table 1. Selected DL980 Test Results

Business process Legacy env (secs) HP DL980 (secs) HP Advantage

Fi Sales 10,249 5,574 45.6%

EDI 13,276 2,146 83.8%

Replenishment 10,316 399 96.1%

Physical Inventory 9,762 6,072 37.8%

PCN Reports 24,474 18,234 25.5%

Stores Order 56,952 24,550 56.9%

Average improvement---> 57.6%

MAJOR U.S. RETAILER

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Figure 1. Production Environment

MAJOR U.S. RETAILER

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Global Communications Services Enterprise HP Proliant DL980—not Oracle Exadata—proves a perfect fit for Sun environmentLeery of Exadata cost The incumbent hardware vendor, Oracle, pitched Exadata, calling it a “perfect fit” as a Sun SPARC 6900 replacement. The company’s IT management was unconvinced: the Exadata solution for software and hardware was too expensive and keeping their aging 6900s would take up too much space and cost too much in energy and maintenance fees. The company turned to HP for an alternative.

The HP team briefed the IT staff on the full ProLiant server line, including the newly launched DL980 G7 server. Excited about the prospects, the company requested a platform evaluation at its own data center.

DL980 meets technology challenges of today and tomorrow HP assembled a core team with expertise in ProLiant servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the customer’s preferred operating system. ACS, an HP Elite Value-Added Reseller Partner, contributed technical staff as well. Before running the evaluation, HP had to convert the database by reversing the byte order, which is necessary when moving from Solaris to Linux. This conversion had to take place with little downtime—a tall order for such a pervasive change.

By the end of the testing, the DL980 had hit all its targets for performance, scalability, and reliability. It passed a DR test, failing over to an alternate site within the required time. The HP team also created a detailed spreadsheet analysis of the energy and space requirements and maintenance fees of the DL980. These numbers showed conclusively that the HP DL980 delivers a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than the Oracle Exadata system.

Right mix of ProLiant serversThe HP ProLiant server family was clearly the right choice, but which model? The company decided on the DL980 to provide room for growth. Now the company’s database platform includes five ProLiant DL980 servers—three for production, one for test, and one for DR—along with a number of ProLiant DL360 and DL380 machines working as application servers. In the end, it was not Oracle but HP that turned out to be the perfect fit.

Situation:In the past, this global communication services firm powered its business operations with five Sun SPARC Enterprise 6900 servers (now part of Oracle SPARC servers). However, a planned move to Oracle Database 11g Release 2 threatened to stretch the SPARC platform to its limit. The company was at a crossroads: Squeeze more from the 6900 servers or invest in a new platform that can support growth?

Objective:Help manufacturing firm make a smooth transition from outdated Sun SPARC/Solaris servers to an HP x86/Linux platform that delivers performance, scalability, and reliability to sustain company growth.

Approach:•Identifiedcustomer’sgoals

•Builttestsuiteincompany’sdatacenter

•Assisteddatabaseconversion

•Demonstrateddisasterrecovery(DR)failover

•AnalyzedanddocumentedDL980savingsversusOracleExadata

•ConsultedwithITteamtoselectbestHPProLiantmodels

Results:•Reducedpower,cooling,andmaintenancecosts

•Converteddatabasefromlargeendiandataformatstosmall endian formats with little downtime

•Resultedinsuccessfulfailovertodisasterrecovery(DR)site

•Maintainedprovenscalabilityandperformanceundertypical operating conditions

GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS SERVICES ENTERPRISE

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Financial Services Bureau Firm shorts Oracle Exadata, places buy order for HP ProLiant DL980 ServersSeeking a More Flexible PlatformThe trading firm asked Oracle for a solution. Oracle already had a strong presence in the data center, including an extensive deployment of its software applications plus Sun hardware. Oracle proposed three quarter-rack Exadata systems—one for production, a second for DR, and a third for development and testing. Exadata looked promising at first glance, but was pricey. In benchmark tests, it easily outperformed the current Sun platform, for example, reducing the time for a typical ETL operation from 83 minutes to just over seven minutes. However, the IT group had concerns about the inflexibility of the Exadata architecture, which scales by doubling from quarter-rack to half-rack to full-rack—an expensive and space-wasting way to expand. Seeking a more flexible alternative, the trader invited HP to bid.

HP wins across the boardHP’s team analyzed the requirements and proposed a system consisting of HP ProLiant DL980 Servers and Violin Flash Memory Arrays. Performance was the paramount criterion. To win the customer over, the HP ProLiant DL980/Violin solution had to beat Oracle Exadata’s customer benchmark results.

The HP platform outperformed Exadata conclusively. In fact, HP’s offering was so obviously superior that the trading firm’s IT group shut down the test before its conclusion and began contract negotiations with HP.

HP DL980 won across the board in virtually every test. Running actual transactional data, the DL980 executed the ETL test in 5.1 minutes, 28% faster than Oracle Exadata. In a typical user query test, Exadata took 16 seconds. The DL980 beat this mark by 75%. And compared to the legacy Sun servers, the DL980’s query performance was as much as 98% faster (See Table 2 for test results).

Table 2. Selected DL980 Test Results

Operation Units Legacy Sun environment

Exadata benchmark

test

HP DL980 Evaluation

HP advantage

over Exadata

HP advantage over Sun

ETL minutes 83 7.1 5.1 28% 94%

Query 1 seconds 24 16 4 75% 83%

Query 2 seconds 90 17 21 -24% 77%

Query 3 seconds 74 not tested 1.1 NA 98%

Query 4 minutes 13 not tested 1.5 NA 89%

Situation:Financial institutions live and die by data, a fact that this large North American service bureau has leveraged into a thriving business. The company offers a range of online financial services, but also provides turnkey solutions to financial institutions—in effect, acting as a systems integrator and outsourcer.

One of the service bureau’s customers, a large securities trader, had a mountain of information to process and an IT infrastructure that could not keep up with the processing needs. The trader needed to extract and load a full terabyte of transactional data into its Oracle BI/DW every night, produce daily dashboard reports for management, and run ad hoc queries for hundreds of users at a time. The current platform—Oracle/Sun x86 servers running Linux and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC)—was relatively new, but still could not perform these operations fast enough to meet the trader’s service level agreements (SLAs).

Objective:Overcome a good Exadata benchmark trial and provide a flexible platform to upgrade the customer’s BI/DW environment to Oracle 11g Release 2

Approach:•Analyzedcustomer’sperformancerequirements

•DesignedreferencearchitecturebasedonDL980serversand Violin Memory Arrays

•BuiltandtestedDL980platforminHPSolutionCenterinCupertino

•Ranbatteryofcustomertests

•EvaluatedHPresultsagainstOracleExadatabenchmarks

Results:•Improvedextract-transfer-load(ETL)testperformanceby

28% over Exadata

•Boostedtypicaluserqueryperformanceby75%overExadata

•Delivered98%performanceimprovementoverlegacySunplatform

•Resultedinlessthantwo-minuterecoverytimeobjective(RTO)

•Achieved‘proof’ofRTOwithoutOracleRAC

FINANCIAL SERVICES BUREAU

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Disaster recovery SLAs without Oracle RACWidely accepted among financial firms is the need for Oracle RAC to increase the reliability of Oracle database deployments. Oracle encourages this idea and requires that customers purchase a license for Oracle RAC with every Exadata system.

The trial proved otherwise. The firm required a complete recovery from system failure—RTO—in no more than two minutes. Using standard software included with the Oracle database 11g R2, the HP DL980/Violin solution easily achieved the two-minute RTO target. Eliminating the need to buy Oracle RAC—the so-called “RAC tax”—saves tens of thousands of dollars per CPU and simplifies installation and operation.

Moving forward with HP DL980 and Violin MemoryThe trading firm placed an order for a new platform based on the Flash Memory Array products from Violin Memory connected to the DL980 servers via 8GB Fibre Channel switches. The system architecture includes:

Production system—two HP ProLiant DL980 Servers and two Violin Flash Memory Arrays (See Figure 2 for •production environment)Performance test system—two HP ProLiant DL980 Servers and one Violin Flash Memory Array•DR system—one HP ProLiant DL980 Server and two Violin Flash Memory Arrays•

Figure 2. Production environment for financial services bureau

FINANCIAL SERVICES BUREAU

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The production environment consisted of two DL980s with four processors (16 cores) and 512GB of memory each—a configuration that was sufficient for the initial performance requirements. Each DL980 had two HP NC550SFP Dual Port 10GbE NICs and six AJ764A Dual Port 8Gbit Fibre Channel cards. The number of Fibre Channel ports was far more than the customer needed for the initial performance requirements, but would allow for future growth without the need for rewiring. RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.6 and Oracle Database 11g R2 were used with no special tuning.

During the ETL process, the system spent 75% of its time in I/O wait state—a cause for concern. The HP team analyzed the situation and discovered that virtually all of this time was spent switching between Oracle log files. Increasing the size of the log files from 100MB to 1TB more than doubled system performance, and alleviated the concerns.

After all tests were completed, the HP team enabled archive log mode, a request from the operations team to support on-line backups. The impact was negligible—less than 2% decrease in performance.

Scalability, flexibility, and open standards Reflecting on the evaluation process, the trading firm identified three primary reasons for choosing the HP DL980 solution:

Scalability: the ability to grow in small increments from the current 16 cores to 80 cores per server, and from •the current 20TB to hundreds of terabytes without changing the basic hardwareFlexibility: scaling options included adding new processors, memory, storage, and I/O cards, or upgrading •to processors with more coresOpen Standards: proven industry standards-based technology in x86 servers supporting Linux and Fibre •Channel storage

FINANCIAL SERVICES BUREAU

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Healthcare Institution HP ProLiant DL980 cures healthcare information database when IBM mainframe falls sickIBM fails to make the gradeAsked to architect a solution, IBM proposed to host the Oracle database on a mainframe platform consisting of two IBM System z10 servers running Linux. The IBM sales team ignored the recommendation of HP and the provider, and assured the customer that their system would meet specifications—but they were wrong. IBM engineers and the customer’s IT team labored for months in an attempt to make the mainframe system perform as promised and finally gave up. The decision to go with IBM turned out to be a regrettable mistake, one that left the customer scrambling to find another platform. The customer therefore asked the provider and HP to bid on the platform.

HP presented an architecture based on the HP ProLiant DL980 Server, Fusion Solid-State Storage, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (See Figure 3). Understandably cautious, the provider asked for concrete proof that this system would meet the response time, reliability, and scalability specifications.

The customer and the provider conducted a string of tests with help from HP engineers. The DL980 not only easily beat the IBM results, but also exceeded the SLA targets established by the application developer. Pleased with the DL980 results, the provider placed an order for a complete DL980 system—at a fraction of the cost of a mainframe.

Situation:A mid-sized European healthcare institution sought to streamline the operation and management of a key electronic patient application and its associated database, so it turned to a trusted hosting provider. The provider analyzed the institution’s situation and developed a set of specifications for hosting the Oracle Database 10g. Application response time was a top priority as nurses and doctors need fast and reliable access to patient information to provide quality care. Scalability was also important to ensure that the platform could sustain the institution’s projected rapid growth.

Objective:Demonstrate that the HP ProLiant DL980 Server has the necessary performance and reliability for this critical healthcare database, and the scalability to support the institution’s growth.

Approach: •InstalledaDL980systematthecustomer’ssiteonatry-

and-buy basis

•Replicatedthecustomer’senvironmentintheHPGrenobleSolution Center

•Helpedtheprovider’sITteamloadsoftwareontotheDL980, including the healthcare application, Oracle Database 10g, and Red Hat management tools

•Providedtechnicalassistanceforhardwareandsoftwareoptimization

Results:•ShowedcapabilitytooutperformIBMserversincritical

response time tests

•Providedconclusiveevidenceofscalabilitytoaccommodate growth

•Metcustomer’sperformanceandreliabilityrequirements

HEALTHCARE INSTITUTION

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Figure 3. Production environment for healthcare institution

HEALTHCARE INSTITUTION

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Global System Integrator Massive SQL Server database runs on HP DL980, delivers responsive, reliable access for tens of thousands of usersThe customer conducted several performance tests with HP engineers closely involved to review results and make recommendations about how to enhance the DL980/SQL Server configuration for top performance. Starting with a small number of users, the customer then increased the number over time to prove that the DL980 could scale.

The HP team invited the customer to the HP Cupertino Solution Center. Over a two-day period, the two teams discussed in depth the features and capabilities of the Windows/SQL Server/DL980 solution as well as HP’s ProLiant roadmap. In this initial session, HP’s technical experts impressed the customer’s staff and the teams forged a strong working relationship.

HP ProLiant DL980 more than a match for IBM serversTo ensure the best results vis-à-vis IBM, the team spent considerable time tuning the customer’s Windows/SQL environment on the DL980 to achieve optimal performance results. Microsoft experts helped optimize SQL Server performance on the DL980.

The HP ProLiant DL980 Server equaled or outperformed IBM in every category. In one scalability test, it supported 5,000 simulated users at just 65% CPU utilization. The HP server also proved that it could handle the massive size of the institution’s database—32TB of information stored on 600 146GB disks—without sacrificing responsiveness. These results convinced the customer that the solution using DL980s could scale up to the needed size of 40,000 or more without sacrificing performance.

Based on the DL980’s performance and its favorable impression of HP’s technical staff, the customer chose the DL980 for this SQL Server database deployment. In addition to HP’s technical expertise, the decision to move to the HP DL980 solution was based on HP’s long-term server product roadmap and the DL980’s scalability to support multi-terabyte SQL Server databases. A key factor was the ProLiant brand. In the customer’s eyes, the DL980 was the latest and most powerful system in a server line that had a track record of performance success.

Situation:This global system integrator has a long-running contract with a government institution to deliver a service that relies on a huge, multi-terabyte database platform. Performance is critical. The institution’s sizable user base—potentially up to 40,000 or more—needs access to critical information without long delays. Reliability and scalability are other important criteria.

The existing solution was hosted on a legacy Windows environment. However the introduction of the HP ProLiant DL980 provided an alternative, leveraging the customer’s many years of experience. HP briefed the customer’s IT management on the new DL980 and piqued their interest based on the institution’s excellent experience with other ProLiant servers. Meanwhile, IBM was pushing hard for its System x3850 and x3950 servers. To drive the decision process, the customer asked HP to conduct a DL980 test to demonstrate that the server would be able to accommodate anticipated user growth over the contract term.

Objective:Show that the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Server can outperform IBM x86 servers and provide responsive, reliable, scalable access to huge databases even with tens of thousands of users.

Approach: •Conductedextensivediscussionswiththecustomerto

demonstrate HP’s technical expertise and define the optimal DL980 configuration and settings

•ProvidedaDL980betasystemwithaddedmemoryandI/O for performance testing and operational evaluation

•Helpeddesign,build,andsupportthetestbedatthecustomer site

Results:•Achievedperformanceandscalabilityequaltoor

exceeding IBM servers across all tests

•Providedsupportfor5,000usersat65%CPUutilization

•Deliveredresponsiveaccesstothe32TBdatabase

GLOBAL SYSTEM INTEGRATOR

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Technical detailsFigure 4 shows the DL980 test setup. HP LoadRunner software was used to drive the application layer of the solution, which in turn generated the database load. The DL980 database server was clustered for high availability. Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 were chosen because they support the performance features of the DL980, for example, greater than 64 threads, and also include hot fixes designed by HP to improve performance.

The DL980 was configured with:

Eight X7560 2.27GHz CPU’s with 24MB cache•512GB memory•Four dual-port 8GB host bus adapters (HBAs)•Four dual-port 1 GbE network interface cards (NICs)•Redundant power supplies•

In addition to proving the performance of the DL980, the testing also suggested improvements to the solution, in particular, the architecture of the application session-state servers, the storage LUN design, and the database server network design.

Ongoing testing showed that the number of supported users could be increased by tuning the long-running SQL procedures used by the application. The DL980 test system is now being used for application performance and tuning.

GLOBAL SYSTEM INTEGRATOR

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Figure 4. Test setup for global system integrator

GLOBAL SYSTEM INTEGRATOR

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© Copyright 2011 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Intel and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Red Hat is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc. SAP and other SAP products and services are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries.

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ConclusionUnderstandably, as an IT manager you have tough demands on resources and technology. You require performance and TCO advantages, as well as product flexibility and scalability, and a partner who can collaborate to meet your evolving needs. These customer use cases show the business benefits that led IT managers just like you in a range of industries to migrate from legacy infrastructures to the HP ProLiant DL980 Servers. In these scenarios and ones like yours, the HP ProLiant DL980 is the best alternative to lower costs and keep pace with business growth—at a fraction of the cost of maintaining outdated legacy environments. When put to the test under the most demanding conditions, the HP ProLiant proved itself again and again. Are you ready for the DL980 to help you handle your challenging business-critical applications?

For more informationLearn what the HP ProLiant DL980 can do in your environment. Call your HP representative today or visit http://www.hp.com/servers/dl980