Dell Performance

BIND DNS Performance on Dell and SUN Servers Running Solaris

Date : 1/19/2009
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To analyze what customers might experience, Principled Technologies™ (PT) compared a typical existing installation with a typical new purchase configuration for customers that were staying with Solaris and its bundled BIND DNS server software, but were migrating from RISC to x86.

PT measured the DNS performance of the following two servers running the Sun Solaris operating system:
  • Dell™ PowerEdge™ R900 running BIND 9.3.5-P1 on Solaris 10
  • Sun Fire V440 running BIND 8.3.3 on Solaris 9

The test was not focused on achieving maximum performance but rather on the performance typical of a real-world scenario. A common system configuration for an existing Sun environment — a three-year-old Sun Fire v440 with 32 GB of RAM and all of its disk drive bays full (four 73GB 10K drives) — was selected and compared to a moderate configuration of a new six-core Intel® Xeon® 7400 series-based Dell PowerEdge R900 server with 64 GB of RAM.

The DNSPerf 1.0.1.0 (DNSPerf) test tool was used to measure the performance of each configuration running a custom workload. When using one of its 24 cores in a Solaris Container, the Dell PowerEdge R900 running BIND 9.3.5-P1 on Solaris 10 achieved a 45.5 percent increase over the performance of the Sun Fire V440 running BIND 8.8.8 on Solaris 9 without virtualization.