Cisco Partners with AMD to set a World Record! – Cisco Blogs

Cisco^® C245 M6 Server Powered by 3^rd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processor Achieves TPC-H 30TB World Record for Microsoft SQL Server 2019

With industry server performance benchmarks, there is a “winner” or top result followed by everyone else.  Cisco is pleased to announce that we have once again extended our dominance in SQL Server based TPC-H results by posting a new result of 1,650,000 (QphH)* running SQL Server 2019 for the 30TB TPC-H decision support benchmark. This result is 14% higher than HPE’s best result and 29% better then Cisco’s previous posting of 1,278,277 (QphH) posted back in 2020.

Benchmarks are an undeniable measure of performance on a specific workload, the top result is the clear winner and no amount of fancy marketing messaging can alter these hard cold facts!  This is why customers continue to use benchmarks as a part of their system selection criteria.

Raw performance

Some vendors will try to point to a $$/Kperf advantage but fail to recognize that this advantage is diminished should the opposing vendor simply provide a larger discount off list price.  Hence, hard for customers to see this metric as an advantage either way.  Also, the number of processor cores consumed is often highlighted as an advantage with the idea being that fewer cores to license SQL Server on the better.  However, many enterprise customers have site-wide licenses that provide a fixed price not dependent on the core count; and, other customers could be taking advantage of a number of other discount possibilities. Once again, the core count metric is muted.  Raw performance remains the primary metric to consider.

The C245 M6 is the latest two-socket server from Cisco powered by the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processor family.  The system contained (2) AMD EPYC™ 7763 64 Cores @2.5GHz, 280W processors, 8 TB of main memory, and (8) 6.4TB Intel Arbordale Plus NVMe Drives to help to provide the best performance.  In addition, this two-socket server is physically smaller than the four-socket HPE Superdome Flex 280 Server, as a result the customer can rack and stack more C245 M6 servers in a standard 42U rack.  Finally, the C245 M6 is managed by Cisco Intersight™ which is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) hybrid cloud operations platform which delivers intelligent automation, observability, and optimization to customers for traditional and cloud-native applications and infrastructure.

3^rd Gen AMD EPYC Series Processors are built on the new “Zen 3” core and AMD Infinity Architecture with 128-160 lanes of industry-leading PCIe® Gen 4 I/O, 7nm x86 CPU technology, and an integrated security processor on die.  AMD EPYC 7003 CPUs provide up to 32MB of L3 cache per core, 4-6-8 memory channel interleaving designed for better economies and performance in multiple DIMM configurations, plus synchronized clocks between fabric and memory.

SQL Server 2019 is the most recent generally available release of what has become the most popular relational database in terms of customer installations in the world today.  Microsoft has a long history dating back to the initial design of the Cisco UCS system released back in 2009.  Over this time, Cisco has maintained a constant stream of leading non-clustered TPC-H results for a number of versions of SQL Server from 2012 – 2019.  You can see for yourself on the TPC-H Vesion 2 and Version 3  site.

The best server or system for your organization

Growing up, everyone remembers who was the faster runner in school.  How they looked, the shoes they used, what shirt they wore, or any other “metric” did not matter.  The only criteria was raw performance.  Today, this is the same criteria when determining which server or system is best for your organization, and if you are looking at your SQL Server based workloads you should take time to consider the AMD based Cisco C245 M6 managed by Cisco Intersight.  The time invested will be worth it!

* The TPC Benchmark™H (TPC-H) is a decision support benchmark. It consists of a suite of business oriented ad-hoc queries and concurrent data modifications. The queries and the data populating the database have been chosen to have broad industry-wide relevance. This benchmark illustrates decision support systems that examine large volumes of data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and give answers to critical business questions.

The performance metric reported by TPC-H is called the TPC-H Composite Query-per-Hour Performance Metric (QphH@Size), and reflects multiple aspects of the capability of the system to process queries. These aspects include the selected database size against which the queries are executed, the query processing power when queries are submitted by a single stream, and the query throughput when queries are submitted by multiple concurrent users. The TPC-H Price/Performance metric is expressed as $/QphH@Size. http://www.tpc.org/tpch/

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