In a previous blog I wrote about the deep relationships we have with server OEM partners many of you deploy today. These server vendors have come to trust and rely on us to provide them with the best in class flash storage solutions for their systems and customers. These solutions were used by our partners take top honors in world record benchmarks.
SQL Server 2016 makes them even faster.
Getting up to Speed
In the last seven months alone, we have helped our partners achieve 8 new world records by taking advantage of SanDisk®-branded Fusion ioMemory™ PCIe accelerators and SanDisk-branded Lightning SSDs!
This is a huge achievement both for hardware acceleration as well as the power of software and the many benefits customers will see using SQL Server 2016. But the question you may be asking is ‘how exactly can this help me or my organization?’ It is a great question!
Superior performance, or as we like to say ‘speeds and feeds,’ is only important if it can be utilized to help make businesses more successful. Superior performance can help companies make decisions faster and more accurately. It does this by helping to accelerate the flow of data into database applications so decision-making can happen while data is still hot and actionable. Stale data can lead a company in the wrong direction and let the competition leapfrog your success.
With the new release of Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft has included a number of new features and tools to make smarter decisions including advanced analytics and high-performance data analytics. To effectively utilize these features flash storage solutions are necessary to help the underlying hardware to keep up.
A Game of Balance
Cost is one of the biggest challenges for any database deployment. SQL Server is no different. With CPU core-based licensing, core efficiency (high core utilization) will help you to maximize your license investment, as additional licenses often mean reduced budget from other data center investments.
I/O nirvana is achieved when a data warehouse utilizes both the storage performance and available CPU cycles to their full potential.Getting to this balance requires a deep understanding of both hardware and software needs. That’s why we have worked with both Microsoft and our OEM partners to create validated, optimized, pre-sized solutions for various data warehouse needs and capacities. These are called Data Warehouse Fast Track (DWFT) certifications, and they provide a sure recipe to build optimized data warehouse solutions. The two examples below contain the best balance of both compute and storage to fully utilize your SQL Server license investment.
Built to Utilize CPU to the Max
In the 36TB example shown above, we were able to architect a configuration that utilized a full 98% of the available CPU performance, which is amazing. This means we were fully using the installed and licensed CPUs with only 2% not being used. In our partnership with Lenovo we architected a 145TB reference architecture that utilized 88% of the available CPU. For a dataset of that enormous size these results are fantastic and deliver great improvements to many current architectures.
Learn More!
SanDisk and our OEM server partners are here to help accelerate your data warehouse with a perfectly balanced solution. From 7TB to 145TB and a wide range of capacities in between, the balance that our DWFT reference architectures provide will help optimize your own SQL Server data warehouse and help you achieve your own world records!
- If you happen to be a SQL Pass 2016 in Seattle, please come by the booth and see these solutions in action!
- See our full portfolio of optimized Data Warehouse Fast Track Reference Architectures here!