The competitive demand of today's applications and business requirements dictates that data center server infrastructure deliver increasing results while still maximizing ROI by lowering total cost of ownership. The technology solutions being developed today need to accomplish the following to be deemed a successful implementation:

• Minimize complexity
• Be cost efficient
• Adaptable to changing workflow demands
• Fast and straight-forward deployment

A new solution at the World Wide Technology Advanced Technology Center (ATC) showcases the latest server products available from our partners Intel, Dell Technologies, and VMware. Through decades of partnership, these vendors have consistently delivered the very best for data center server infrastructure. We are excited to introduce a new lab environment to spotlight the technologies that will meet the needs of today and adapt to the needs of tomorrow.

The Solution

The solution begins with a foundation of Dell PowerEdge 15th Generation Server hardware. This next generation server boasts Dell Multi-Vector Cooling 2.0, which is an advanced thermal design to provide superior cooling necessary for powerful workloads. The servers in the lab each house two 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Each 10nm processor has 28 cores with Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology. The motherboard is compliant with PCIe 4.0 and capable of 16 GT/s, doubling the throughput of its predecessor. Finally, the 3rd generation Xeon processor supports 16 DIMM slots for both DDR4-3200 and Optane™ Persistent Memory 200 Series memory modules. 

Each of the four hosts has 2TB of Intel® Optane™ Persistent Memory 200 Series modules and 512GB of DDR4-3200. The Persistent Memory (PMem) operates in memory mode, which means the PMem acts as volatile host memory, and the host DRAM acts as a hardware cache. Improving on the previous generation, the Optane™ Persistent Memory 200 Series can transfer at the same 3200 MT/s as DRAM. With the 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor, each DIMM slot is capable of running at the maximum speed even in a fully populated system. Intel also makes use of the speed enhancements of PCIe 4 with Intel Optane SSD P4800X Series NVMe disks, further accelerating the storage capabilities of this lab.

All of this top tier hardware requires an equally innovative software layer to unlock the power and speed of these components. For this purpose, our lab is running VMware vSphere 7 with VMware vSAN 7. Utilizing the NVMe disks on PCIe 4, vSAN pools together the disks in software to provide extremely fast, shared, and locally protected storage for the cluster. vSphere 7 introduces several new features that allow VMware administrators to have more visibility into these new memory technologies. One such feature is the new VMware vSphere Memory Monitoring and Remediation (vMMR) technology, allowing vSphere to be aware of installed PMem in the hosts. Administrators can access new statistics and analytics to monitor and manage the performance and operation of PMem hardware using vMMR.

We are excited to offer this new lab as another solution for solving today's business needs. This lab represents a new way of thinking about server architecture that reduces complexity, scales for dynamic workloads, and remains cost efficient. Through our ATC Insights, we place technology under heavy workload scenarios and can show the deep technical benchmarking results of these labs to help deliver the correct solution for a given use case. In the near future, you will be able to read our ATC Insight for this lab environment to view the results of our testing. Contact your WWT account team today if you would like to know more about this lab and how this technology solution can integrate into your environment.