Abstract

Tolly benchmarked a Dell PowerEdge R6725 server (17th generation, dual-socket AMD EPYC 9555) fitted with Broadcom Emulex LPe38102 Secure 64 Gbit/s Fibre-Channel HBAs against the same platform throttled to 32 Gbit/s. The server was cabled end-to-end at 64 GFC to a Dell PowerMax 2500 array; tests were run in January 2025 using both Oracle TimesTen and Microsoft SQL Server workloads to compare database load/transaction time and sustained storage throughput .

On the Oracle TimesTen in-memory database, 64 GFC cut load time for a 102.5 GB data set from 37 s to 23 s—a 37.8 % improvement—and boosted average storage throughput from 2.93 GB/s to 4.88 GB/s (-66.6 % faster)   .

SQL Server’s HammerDB TPROC-H analytics workload likewise benefited: query completion time dropped from 504 s to 259 s (-48.6 %) while storage throughput climbed from roughly 3.0 GB/s to 5.67 GB/s ( +87.5 %)  . Earlier Tolly work shows that moving from 16 GFC to the same 64 GFC fabric can enable roughly 4:1 server consolidation, underscoring the business value of upgrading both host HBAs and storage to Gen-7 64 Gbit/s Fibre Channel .