Hewlett-Packard White Paper Sample

Chapter 1: Traditional Challenges and Their Impact

SQL Server can be an organization's greatest asset and—from a corporate management perspective—a complex challenge. The reason is that SQL Server (or any enterprise-class database system, for that matter) places a heavy demand on infrastructure resources such as servers, the network, and storage. Many organizations continually struggle to scale their SQL Server installations to meet business demand—including requirements for availability in the face of hardware failure—while at the same time bemoaning the "data center bloat" that seems to be the unavoidable companion of large SQL Server installations. A lot of that is simply the cost of SQL Server's success in the enterprise: As companies find more uses for SQL Server, there are inevitably more SQL Server installations to deal with. Some of the challenge comes from what I'll call traditional SQL Server architecture, which too often consists primarily of double-clicking Setup,account.

In fact, SQL Server and "data center bloat" don't necessarily go together any more than SQL Server and "difficult to manage" do. With the right tools and techniques, you can have a top-performing SQL Server infrastructure without having to cram your data centers with so much hardware that they're all but overflowing. Some of these tools and techniques may not seem very obvious, which is perhaps why many SQL Server architects don't discover them right away. They are, however, extremely effective.

It's all about infrastructure optimization, or letting your application get the very most from the infrastructure that it's running on. Before I can begin to share some of these new techniques, however, I need to back up a bit and explain exactly why so many organizations aren't really optimizing their SQL Server platform.....