EMC Corporation has announced new reference architectures and best practices for mission-critical Microsoft SQL Server environments to help customers increase efficiency and reduce costs related to ongoing data management challenges.
John Jordaan, Business Development Manager of EMC Southern Africa, says: “Based on proven methodologies, these solutions from EMC can help improve integration and deployment, scalability, speed of reporting and uptime for information analysis.”
One customer already benefiting from EMC's solutions for SQL Server environments is Microsoft and its massively scalable infrastructure that supports its adCenter Business Intelligence (BI) platform. With the improved scale and performance provided by EMC tiered storage solutions, Microsoft estimates it will save nearly 70% in adCenter storage infrastructure costs over the next five years.
IT administrators at Microsoft depend upon a highly scalable infrastructure for the Microsoft adCenter Business Intelligence platform to support a rapidly expanding volume of online advertisements and services. In 2009, the Microsoft adCenter platform delivered $1.9 billion in online advertising revenue from online properties, including Bing, MSN, Windows Live and Yahoo!
EMC Global Services, together with Microsoft adCenter experts, architected and deployed SQL Server for business analytics along with the EMCSymmetrix VMAX and EMC FAST tiered storage system to optimise the adCenter BI platform and significantly enhance scalability, availability and performance. The implementation provided Microsoft with a capacity-on-demand model based on EMC's virtual provisioning, automated management and high-density drives.
Validated through in-depth testing and analysis conducted by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Lab, Microsoft projects the EMC implementation will increase storage utilisation by 36%, reduce storage space and energy requirements by more than 90%, and reduce storage infrastructure costs by 69% over the next five years.
“With the tremendous growth of adCenter, Microsoft has looked for ways to continue to give customers the highest quality advertising interfaces, business intelligence and enhanced performance, while keeping costs down,” says Sasha Berger, BI Architect at Microsoft. “EMC technologies have helped fill the need by working seamlessly with Microsoft SQL Server to boost scalability, data replication and rapid backup.”
Brian Garrett, Vice-President, ESG Lab, Enterprise Strategy Group, agrees. “Sometimes we get caught up in exotic new solutions and forget what a difference basic storage consolidation can make. EMC was able to create an extremely reliable, high-performance and automated adCenter environment with an attractive total cost of ownership.
“Microsoft SQL Server and EMC Symmetrix storage are at the heart of the adCenter BI infrastructure. The fact that these products can handle this system, given its size and growth, is testament alone to their robustness. EMC has been a leader in this game for a long time and the adCenter deployment is an example of why this is the case.”
New reference architectures and applied technology best practices from EMC can help meet customer needs to enhance performance, availability and reliability, as well as create a cost-efficient Microsoft SQL Server environment:
* Optimised performance and reduced costs - customers rely on Microsoft SQL Server to run demanding applications such as online transaction processing (OLTP). EMC Symmetrix VMAX with enterprise flash drives and http://www.emc.com/products/detail/hardware/symmetrix-vmax.htm EMC FAST were deployed in a Microsoft SQL environment using 30 fibre channel (FC) drives. The deployment reduced power and cooling costs by up to 45% and increased the speed and performance of an OLTP application workload by up to 80%. This architecture was designed to compare against a deployment of 90 fibre channel drives.
* Improved availability and reliability - customers seek to fully extend the benefits of EMC VPLEX when deployed within a virtualised SQL Server environment. To help optimise this potential, EMC created an environment that included EMC VPLEX virtual storage, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Hyper-V. The proven results of the architecture showed dynamic migration across multiple sites, better availability and a more reliable way to provision and manage storage federation across systems.
Complementing EMC solutions for SQL Server environments, EMC Global Services has introduced a new portfolio of consulting offerings for business intelligence, analytics and deployment that are tailored to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) appliance. These solutions can help customers perform analyses on hundreds of billions of rows of data.
“Microsoft SQL Server customers are looking to increase the value of their information for business analytics with more efficient performance, while at the same time saving costs,” Jordaan says. “Our new solutions for SQL Server can help them confidently realise these goals and transform data assets into actionable information through guidance, applied technology best practices and services.”
Share