Dell Inc. commissioned Principled Technologies to estimate how many months it would take to recapture initial investment costs when consolidating multiple 4-year-old Dell PowerEdge 2850 server and storage solutions onto a Dell PowerEdge R710 server and storage solution using VMware ESX. In this report, we estimate both the number of older solutions each Dell PowerEdge R710 solution can replace and the payback period for replacing those older solutions.

This report compares the following two solutions:

• Intel Xeon Processor X5550-based Dell PowerEdge R710 server with 96GB of memory using VMware ESX and Dell EqualLogic PS 6000XV storage (Dell PowerEdge R710 solution)
• Intel Xeon Processor 3.6GHz-based Dell PowerEdge 2850 server with 4GB of memory and Dell PowerVault 220S storage (Dell PowerEdge 2850 solution)