Providing HA and Disaster Protection for SQL Server Poses Varity of Challenges – SIOS Technology

SIOS Technology Corp., maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, announced the results of its SQL Server HA survey of large corporations in the United States (76%) and Europe (9%).

The survey elicited responses from 191 IT professionals across a range of vertical industries to understand current trends and challenges related to providing HA and DR for SQL Server.
 
Specific areas covered by the survey, included identifying the most important challenges to providing HA and DR; understanding the costs of HA and DR for SQL Server; and determining the plans and priorities for 2014/2015.
 
Following are key findings based on survey results:

• Improving SQL Server performance is a top priority for 43% of respondents.
• Rising costs are a significant challenge for SQL HA and DR. The most important challenges (rated significant or somewhat problematic) to providing HA and DR for SQL were: the rising cost of SQL licensing (71%), the cost of SAN storage (68%), SAN configuration limitations (69%).
• Licensing costs have risen sharply since the introduction of SQL 2012. For nearly one third (30%) of respondents, licensing cost increases were either significant (20-30% increase annually) or dramatic (>30% annually).
• SQL Enterprise Edition for HA and DR. The reason most companies (68%) purchased SQL Server Enterprise Edition instead of more cost-effective SQL Server Standard Edition was for HA and DR features.
• Shared storage (SANs) slowed SQL performance for more than half of respondents (51%).
• Need for flexibility. Most respondents (73%) want flexib,ty to use any type of storage as part of a cluster configuration without the limitations of a SAN.
• SQL in the cloud. Nearly half (47%) of respondent would run SQL in the cloud provided that they have failover cluster protection.

“In today’s enterprise SQL Server environments traditional shared storage adds significant cost, often causes slow SQL performance, and limits configuration flexibility, making them impossible or impractical in cloud, hybrid cloud and high performance storage environments,” explaine Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS.  “Companies should consider SANLess cluster solutions that not only eliminate the cost of SAN hardware and administration, but also provide HA and DR protection in the cloud, high performance SSD and mixed environments.”
 
Full survey report (registration needed)