[This is cross posted from my Cisco blog]

As mentioned on the IPTV broadcast yesterday, the preliminary benchmarking for out new blade servers for our Unified Computing System is pretty darn good—something along the lines of 164% faster than previous-gen Intel-based two-socket systems.  I think this not only makes a clear case for the upgrading toIntel Xeon 5500 Series processor but, the same way you would not put a Ferrariengine in a Cavalier, you also want to upgrade to a system that is designed to take advantage of that kind of performance, not just retro-fitted to deal with it.

Here is a rundown of our preliminary results for some key industry benchmarks that cover a variety of workloads:

The VMware VMMark® benchmark indicates a system’s capacity to scale when running virtualized environments. Preliminary benchmark results using a release candidate of VMware next version of ESX show a score of 24.14 running 17 benchmark tiles, an improvement of 164 percent over the prior top-scoring two-socket system based on previous-generation Intel processors.

Cisco UCS performance on the SPECfp® rate_base2006 benchmark is 194, showing high performance for multiple floating-point workloads running in parallel, and demonstrating an improvement of 125 percent over previous-generation systems. Similarly, a SPECint® rate_base2006 result of 239 demonstrates high performance on integer compute-intensive workloads, delivering an improvement of 71 percent over the prior top-scoring system.

The SPECjbb® benchmark demonstrates performance on Java software workloads that place intensive multithreaded workload demands on systems, indicating performance on multi-tier Web server environments and Web 2.0 applications. Cisco UCS performance of 556792 demonstrates breakthrough performance on Oracle JRockit running on the Microsoft Windows 2008 operating system.

Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Server performance extends beyond enterprise applications and into high-performance scientific and engineering workloads. TheSPEComp® MBase2001 benchmark is designed to test the limits of shared-memory, symmetric multiprocessing systems. The Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Server score of 43593 (currently under review) demonstrates industry leadership along with a performance increase of 154 percent over previous-generation systems.

The key thing to point out is that while we are providing Ferrari performance, we are doing it with a Prius energy footprint.  As I noted in my recent conversationwith Intel’s Ed Groden, we see up to 9:1 consolidation with the Intel Xeon 5500 processors, so 184 single core servers could be collapsed into 21 Intel Xeon 5500 Series systems, cutting energy costs by 90%.