Dell has recently launched its next generation servers, including the PowerEdge R720 which is designed for performance. The support for the powerful processors, high memory capacity and the front loading PCIe SSDs makes it highly desirable for high performance demanding application deployments. Microsoft SQL Server is one of the most popular databases which run many performance critical applications worldwide. SQL Server database applications may benefit by having this powerful server as the backend. This whitepaper explores the performance benefits of the PowerEdge R720 for a standard database workload. The CPU performance and the PCIe SSD performance are evaluated using specific OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) test configurations.