This is the wiki home for the whitepaper that discusses the Performance and Energy Advantages of Dell Energy Smart Servers and Liebert Cooling Systems. The whitepaper can be downloaded here.

We welcome discussion and comments about the paper in the Comments section at the bottom of this page. We have taking some important points for the paper and shown them below to begin the discussion

Performance and Energy Advantages of Dell Energy Smart Servers and Liebert Cooling Systems

Whitepaper Executive Summary

The data center of today is a much different place than it was a decade ago. New high-density servers are accelerating the demand for increased power and cooling capacity in the data center while the cost of upgrading or building new facilities may not be in the budget. Traditionally, data centers were built to last up to 10 years but today’s centers are running low on cooling and power capacity in half that time. In addition to capacity concerns, energy costs, government legislation and usage limits imposed by local utilities are increasing the pressure businesses face in managing the data center. As a result, IT organizations are looking for more energy-efficient products to lower their total cost of ownership.

The Energy Smart servers offer significant improvements even in high performance computing environments where the PowerEdge Energy Smart 2950 was shown to provide an average of 17% to 23% better performance per watt over a similarly configured HP DL380 G5.

In addition to engineering advances, Dell’s commitment to energy optimization includes its partnership with Emerson Network power for its best-in-class Liebert cooling systems. Dell worked with Liebert to devise four scenarios, outlined in the paper below, that address common customer problems by utilizing Dell Energy Smart servers and Liebert cooling. In these scenarios where customers were either constrained on power or needed to replace older systems with newer systems for either more power or space, Dell demonstrates increased performance, delayed need for costly data center expansions or retrofitting, decreased power consumption, and/or the recapture of data center floor space. Key results showed:

• Up to a 3.5X performance gain with no increase in facility power requirements
• Up to an 80% performance increase with a reduction in facility power by up to 42%
• As much as a 65% reduction in facility power while maintaining the same level of performance

Whitepaper Highlights

The paper starts by showing increases in system power requirements over the years. Then highlights to engineering done by Dell to decrease this with the introduction of the Energy Smart PowerEdge Server line.

This leads to some dramatic increases in performance per watt as shown in the chart below using the SpecJBB2005 benchmark.


Then partnering with Liebert some incredible power savings can be seen.



The paper also shows how PowerEdge Energy Smart does with processor intensive workloads such as those shown below.



... And how these same benchmarks compare with HP servers.


Please feel free to add your comments below !

SPECjbb®2005 is a registered trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). For more information and current results, please visit SPEC's web site at www.spec.org