We have a new Dell R620, 48GB , Dual E5-2630, H710 Controller with 2 600GB SAS 10K in Raid 1 under Windows Server 2012. This was intended to replace a much older Dell Edge PowerEdge with Dual 1.6ghz E5310's 20GB with 7200RPM SAS on Perc 5i's running Windows Server 2008 R2.
We are using this as an application server.
To our great disappointment - after setting up our app and testing the applications performance - our new box ran 20% slower than the old one.
After reading various posts trying to discover why - we saw a suggestion to try changing the windows power settings (didn't improve anything) and then to try changing the system performance setting in the Bios from the default (I think it is Performance Per Watt) to Performance.
After changing the the system to the Performance setting, we noticed immediate improvement - almost 20% on the Passmark CPU/Memory Benchmarks.
What was surprising was a 235% improvement in Application Processing performance in our intensive application processing - which was a great relief.
So while we are now much happier with our new Server, we wonder what on earth would cause the server to perform so much differently? Anything to do with Windows Server 2012?
Should the 12th Generation Servers come with a Black Box Warning ("Application Processes may run very slowly with Default Bios Settings")?