Lenovo ThinkSystem SR860 V2 The Value of Refreshing Your 4 Socket Servers User Guide
- June 12, 2024
- Lenovo
Table of Contents
- ThinkSystem SR860 V2 The Value of Refreshing Your 4 Socket Servers
- Slow Application Performance
- Performance Increases with each Processor Generation
- Consolidating older 4S servers
- Fewer Total Cores – Reduces Software cost
- Operating System Support
- Warranty Cost
- Security and Compliance
- 1 most reliable, with the industry’s highest customer reliability rating.
- Trademarks
- References
- Read User Manual Online (PDF format)
- Download This Manual (PDF format)
PRESS
ThinkSystem SR860 V2 The Value of
Refreshing Your 4 Socket Servers
User Guide The Value of Refreshing Your 4-Socket Servers with
the ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 Article
ThinkSystem SR860 V2 The Value of Refreshing Your 4 Socket Servers
Today’s 4-socket servers last longer than ever, but data centers will
inevitably need to purchase new servers.
There comes a point when server hardware is simply too old to perform
effectively. The key is to identify when increased performance, energy-
efficiency requirements, maintenance cost and reduced risk of hardware failure
will justify a new purchase.
Why Upgrade your 4S Servers?
Reducing costs and driving operational efficiencies are two of the primary
reason’s organizations upgrade server infrastructure. As servers naturally
age, they typically become costlier to maintain and support.
Business productivity can also be adversely impacted by older servers, which
tend to require more IT staff time and come with a greater risk of unplanned
downtime.
The costs associated with aging servers like warranties, IT staff time, and
downtime can often exceed the cost of buying new servers and upgrading
infrastructure, particularly as servers extend past optimal life cycles.
In addition to cost and operational advantages, regular server refreshes
enable you to consolidate IT footprints onto a fewer number of more powerful
systems. This can translate to an array of other IT benefits including greater
performance, agility, and efficiency. A more powerful, agile, and efficient IT
environment can ultimately help you achieve business goals like improving
customer service or accelerating time to market.
The common benefits of server refresh are the following:
- Higher system reliability
- Improved application performance
- Increased security
- Faster application updates
- Improved virtualization
- Lower maintenance and warranty cost
- Support for the latest Operating system
- Improved employee and customer experience
- Improved infrastructure scalability
- Faster deployment of services
- Improved ability to support innovation efforts
- More efficient IT staffing
- Reduction in Data Center floor space
- Reduced Total Cost of Ownership
Let’s look further into reason to refresh your older 4S server with a new 4S
server.
Click here to check for updates
Slow Application Performance
Your enterprise applications can be severely impacted by older and slower
servers. Application performance is a critical issue that IT and networking
professionals must fully address in order to improve employee productivity,
enhance the user experience and solidify your strategic commitment to
delivering IT services.
Application impacts include:
- Internal facing applications
- Customer facing applications
- Customer facing mobile applications
- Database applications
- Commerce applications
- Reporting and Analytics
- Internet of things
Performance Increases with each Processor Generation
Server performance increases with each server and processor generation.
A 4S system that is 6 years old system will only perform at 31% the level of a
new system. A 4 year old system will only perform at 40% the level of a new
system. Its also likely that the system has slowed down over time as well
making these percentages even lower.
Table 1. Comparison of processor performance
System| Codename| Year| CPU| CPU2017| %
Performance
---|---|---|---|---|---
x3850 X6| Ivy Bridge| 2014| E7-4890 v2| 251| 31%
x3850 X6| Haswell| 2015| E7-8890 v3| 294| 37%
x3850 X6| Broadwell| 2016| E7-8890 v4| 322| 40%
SR950| Sky Lake| 2017| 8180| 583| 72%
SR950| Cascade Lake| 2019| 8280| 675| 84%
SR860 V2| Cedar Island| 2021| 8380H| 806| 100%
- SPEC CPU 2017 Baseline
- The top performing 4S processor was used in each generation
- Conversion from SPEC 2006 to 2017 result was done on older systems
Consolidating older 4S servers
Fewer servers mean smaller numbers of boxes to manage, maintain and physically
house in expensive data center real estate. When one new SR860 V2 does the
work of 2-3 older servers, the environment becomes easier to manage. An
additional benefit to a smaller server footprint is a reduction in the number
of maintenance contracts.
As an example, one SR850 V2 can replace 3.2 of the older x3850 X6 (E7 v2)
systems launched in 2014.
Fewer Total Cores – Reduces Software cost
By consolidating servers, the total core count is also reduced even though the
core count per CPU goes up over time.
Using the same consolidation ratios, you can see how the total core count is
reduced. This savings can be significant depending on the software licensing
agreements and how much total cores increases the software cost.
Table 2. Core counts
Year | Core | Core Per System | Equal performance |
---|---|---|---|
1 SR860 V2 = | Total Core | ||
2014 | 15 | 60 | 3. |
2015 | 18 | 72 | 3. |
2016 | 24 | 96 | 3. |
2017 | 28 | 112 | 1. |
2019 | 28 | 112 | 1. |
2021 | 28 | 112 | 1.0 |
Operating System Support
In many cases, an older server cannot support the latest operating systems
from Microsoft, VMware and Linux. The latest operating systems have new
capabilities or improvements with virtualization, reliability, security,
storage handling, provisioning, server management and licensing. You also
might need to be get off your older Operating System version but your current
server won’t support the newer software versions.
The following table lists examples of operating systems that have hit or are
hitting end of support.
Table 3. Operating systems at or near end of service
Software | End of Mainstream Support | End of Extended Support |
---|---|---|
Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 | 1/13/2015 | 1/14/2020 |
Windows Server 2012 | 10/9/2018 | 10/10/2023 |
VMware vSphere 6.0 | 3/12/2020 | |
VMware vSphere 6.7 & 6.7 | 11/15/2021 | |
VMware vSAN 6.5 & 6.6 | 11/15/2021 | |
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 | 3/31/2019 | 3/31/2022 |
Warranty Cost
New servers typically come with a 3-year warranty. After the third year, server hardware maintenance and warranty become expensive to maintain while the likelihood of server hardware and software issues increases as it gets older. Support and warranty costs associated with aging servers can quickly exceed the cost of upgrading to new infrastructure.
Security and Compliance
Security hackers are now more sophisticated than ever. As your server hardware
ages, hackers have had more opportunity to break past the security guards.
Meanwhile, the latest firmware and patching updates constantly applied. This
process can be cumbersome and time intensive, as you have to ensure hardware
and application compatibility. This process gets harder the older as your
server becomes older.
In addition to security holes, you must make sure that all your systems comply
with regulatory requirements. By simply always patching and fixing, you are
creating a suboptimal solution to meet those standards, and you are constantly
treading on the border of being out of compliance.
What 4S Server Should I Choose for my Refresh?
The SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 are the perfect choice for a 4S refresh of older 4S
servers. Let’s look at these servers from a performance, cost and feature
perspective.
-
Performance
The SR860 V2 has 58 World Record performance benchmark results as of January 1, 2021.
The performance of the 4S SR860 V2 is unmatched in the industry. Industry standard benchmark results are the way to judge and compare the performance of a given server.
The SR860 V2 has 58 world record performance benchmark results as of January 1, 2021:
3 SAP HANA world records
6 SPEC CPU 2017 world records
22 STAC-M3 world records
2 TPC-E world records
1 SPECjbb2015 world record
1 SPEC Power world record
6 SPEC ACCEL world records
16 SPEC MPI world record
1 SPEC OMP world record
Read more about these SR860 V2 World Record Benchmarks . -
Cost Savings
You can frequently use a processor that is one step below the previous generation and improve performance while also reducing cost. This is a Win- Win.
Example 1: 4S – 16C
You achieve a 32% performance gain and 32% cost savings in CPUs by using the 6328H CPU with the SR860 V2 or SR850V2 system vs a 4S system one generation back.
Table 4. Example 1System| Generation| CPU| Core| Watt| SPEC 2017 Int ratebase| Performance Gain| CPU Cost Reduction
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Avg 4S Competitor| Gen 2 Cascade Lake| 6242| 16C| 150W| 366| |
Lenovo| Gen 3 Cedar Island| 6328H| 16C| 165W| 484| 32%| 30%
Example 2: 4S – 24C
You achieve a 5% performance gain and 54% cost savings in CPUs by using the
6348H CPU with the SR860 V2 or SR850 V2 system versus a 4S system one
generation back.
Table 5. Example 2
System| Generation| CPU| Core| Watt| SPEC 2017 Int_ ratebase| Performance
Gain| CPU Cost Reduction
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Avg 4S Competitor| Gen 2 Cascade Lake| 8268| 24C| 205W| 584| |
Lenovo| Gen 3 Cedar Island| 6348H| 24C| 165W| 614| 5%| 54%
3. Key Features
The SR860 V2 Key Features:
• Scalability to Grow- from 2S to 4S, up to 48 DIMM, 14 PCIe and 48 drives
• Tremendous Storage Capabilities – Up to 48 drives, up to 24 NVMe and two 7MM
rear accessible boot drives
• Accelerate Workloads with GPUs – support for up to 4x double -wide or 8x
single wide low profile GPUs
• High Memory and Virtualization Capability – up to 48 DIMM and 12TB of memory
• Reliability and Availability – Lenovo servers continue to be the industry’s
1 most reliable, with the industry’s highest customer reliability rating.
Lenovo x86 servers had the best uptime among all x86 platforms for the 7th straight year.
SR850 V2 Key Features:
- 4S Density – 2U, 4S dense server
- High Memory and Virtualization Capability – up to 48 DIMM and 12TB of memory
- Compute and Memory Scalability – scale from 2 CPUs to 4 CPUs, up to 48 DIMM and 7x PCI
- Storage Capabilities – Up to 24 storage bays and up to 24 NVMe
- Reliability and Availability – Lenovo servers continue to be the industry’s #1 most reliable, with the industry’s highest customer reliability rating. Lenovo x86 servers had the best uptime among all x86 platforms for the 7th straight year.
Conclusion
By replacing older, less capable servers with newer, more powerful Lenovo
Think System SR860 V2 or SR850 V2 servers, you can perform the same amount of
computing with only a fraction of the total number of systems. You can
achieve your business objectives by improving application performance and
scalability, reducing IT sprawl and complexity, lowering hardware and
licensing costs, and by operating an environmentally “green” data center.
About the author
Randall Lundin is the Mission Critical Product Manager in the Lenovo
Infrastructure Solutions Group. He is responsible for managing and planning
Lenovo’s 4-socket and 8-socket servers. Randall has also authored and
contributed to numerous Lenovo Press publications in the Mission Critical
space.
This article is one in a series on the ThinkSystem SR850 V2 and SR860 V2
servers:
- Five Highlights of the Lenovo Think System SR850 V2
- Five Highlights of the Lenovo Think System SR860 V2
- Why Scale-Up With 4S and 8S Servers?
- Unique Intel Features Available with ThinkSystem SR850 V2 and SR860 V2
- ThinkSystem SR860 V2 is the New 4S Performance Leader
- The Value of Refreshing Your 4-Socket Servers with the ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2
- The Perfect 4-Socket and 8-Socket Servers for SAP HANA
- Total Cost of Ownership Comparison of Running SAP HANA on Lenovo ThinkSystem Servers
- RAS Features of the Intel Xeon Scalable Processors on Lenovo Think System Servers
Related product families
Product families related to this document are the following:
- Think System SR860 V2 Server
- Think System SR850 V2 Server
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This document, LP1435, was created or updated on February 24, 2021.
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Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC).
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others.
he Value of Refreshing Your 4-Socket Servers with the
ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2
References
- Five Highlights of the Lenovo ThinkSystem SR850 V2 > Lenovo Press
- Five Highlights of the Lenovo ThinkSystem SR860 V2 > Lenovo Press
- Why Scale-Up With 4S and 8S Servers? > Lenovo Press
- Unique Intel Features Available with ThinkSystem SR850 V2 and SR860 V2 > Lenovo Press
- ThinkSystem SR860 V2 is the New 4S Performance Leader > Lenovo Press
- The Value of Refreshing Your 4-Socket Servers with the ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 > Lenovo Press
- The Perfect 4-Socket and 8-Socket Servers for SAP HANA > Lenovo Press
- Total Cost of Ownership Comparison of Running SAP HANA on Lenovo ThinkSystem Servers > Lenovo Press
- The Value of Refreshing Your 4-Socket Servers with the ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 > Lenovo Press
- ThinkSystem SR850 V2 Server > Lenovo Press
- ThinkSystem SR860 V2 Server > Lenovo Press
- The Value of Refreshing Your 4-Socket Servers with the ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 > Lenovo Press
- Copyright and Trademark Information | Lenovo US | Lenovo US
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