Virtualisation to Hyper V: Inside the Royal Mail's Internal Cloud

The register looks inside the UK's Royal Mail Internal Cloud

If you get 5 minutes take a look and grab the white paper.

http://whitepapers.theregister.co.uk/s/821/3ca1b/306/9064ab76?td=m-ev

VMC Benchmark Update 6 months on

Well, it's been 6 months since we reached the top of the leader-board at Geekbench and we're stil there. Check out the comparative performance data for yourself.

Benchmark results

Some recently published the results from Geekbench give comparative performance and ratings of VMC Server Virtualization Appliances’ vs the main stream.

Most of the ‘Hot-systems” tested on Geekbench are Intel Xeon based so in example 2 we also included an AMD vs AMD to give some idea of how much more punch our systems deliver due to the HPC approach we take to system design, component selection and tuning.

1) TOP Of the Charts VMC vs IBM & Oracle/Sun

http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/top

2) VMC 1200Series IR system using 2 AMD Opteron 6176 2.3Ghz processors winning against DELL PowerEdge R815 using 4 AMD Opteron 6174 2.2Ghz Processors

http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/compare/317797/294440

So it’s not just an Opteron vs Xeon thing though in our experience Opterons perform better in virtualization that the current Xeon range

3) VMC 1200 Series 2CPU system delivering nearly 80% of the performance of a 4 CPU HP DL580 G7.

http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/compare/317905/303241

The HP server appearing on the Geekbench results is (according to HP figures) idle at 541 watts, and at 100% utilisation at 975 watts, assuming the CPU/RAM configuration that was tested, and that it had the same 4 port NIC that the VMCo had.

The VMCo system tested (the one scoring 80% of the HP score) was idle at 119 watts and at 100% at 307 watts.

The VMCo system that beat the HP (the 2nd link in this document) is 185 watts idle, 409 watts at 100% load.

So in this particular test, we are slightly faster than the HP box at less than half the power consumption while under heavy load.