If you follow basketball you know that stats are at the heart of the March Madness – free throw accuracy, baskets made versus attempted, fouls per player/team, and even the number of fans attending a game. Same with our server processors – the industry is in the wild throws of comparing benchmarks, pricing, and power specifications of legacy to the latest server CPUs. So in this time of heightened madness let’s take a look at some interesting stats that have been posted.

A white paper published by HP, “Reducing the Power Consumption of HP ProLiant Servers in the Data Center,” shows how virtualization can help achieve power savings by consolidating several legacy servers onto a fewer number of modern servers.  The study evaluates a hosted-client workload comprised of Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 x64 running with Citrix XenApp™ that is delivering multiple Microsoft Office user sessions.  The baseline for the study is a configuration of 16 first-generation HP ProLiant BL460c server blades running Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® processors and supporting 1,500 user sessions. The study evaluates the number of blades it takes to run the 1,500 user sessions when the workload is virtualized using Citrix XenServer™ on sixth-generation (G6) HP ProLiant blades. Two Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor-based configurations are referenced – one using standard power processors and the other using more power efficient HE model processors.

The table below highlights some of the results of this HP study:

The results demonstrate that virtualization can be used to lower the number of servers required in a XenApp environment, which can help to reduce the physical footprint as well as power and cooling requirements within the data center. The results also showcase the advantage the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers bring over the competition in terms of price per user and power per user.  Compared to the legacy HP BL460c system both of the HP BL465c configurations offer nearly a 70% reduction in power per user, with nearly 25% to 30% lower price per user, depending on processor choice. Compared to the HP BL460c G6, the HP BL465c G6 configurations offer a reduction in power per user of almost 8% to 15%, with around a 20% lower price per user, again depending on processor choice.

So if you have been sitting on the side lines in terms of upgrading your servers – the time is now to join the game. The Six-Core AMD Opteron processor keeps racking up the points in terms of price/performance. And the new 12-Core AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor (known by the code name “Magny-Cours”) that is getting ready to launch is looking to deliver even more value.

What are your thoughts on hosted client computing? Are you virtualizing your XenApp configurations?

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.