New EMC Infrastructure for Microsoft SQL Server …

EMC Corporation announced new reference architectures and best practices for Microsoft SQL Server environments to help customers increase efficiency and reduce costs related to ongoing data management challenges.

Based upon proven methodologies, these solutions from EMC can help improve integration and deployment, scalability, speed of reporting and uptime for information analysis. One customer already benefitting from EMC solutions for SQL Server environments is Microsoft Corp. and its massively scalable infrastructure that supports its adCenter business intelligence (BI) platform. With improved scale and performance provided by EMC tiered storage solutions, Microsoft estimates it will save nearly 70 percent in adCenter storage infrastructure costs over the next five years.

EMC Helps Microsoft Reduce Costs
and Resources for adCenter Infrastructure
IT administrators at Microsoft Corp. depend upon a highly scalable infrastructure for its 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 EMC Symmetrix VMAX and EMC FAST tiered storage system to optimize the adCenter BI platform and significantly enhance scalability, availability and performance. The implementation provided Microsoft with a capacity-on-demand model based upon 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 utilization by 36 percent, reduce storage space and energy requirements by more than 90 percent, and reduce storage infrastructure costs by 69 percent 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," said Sasha Berger, BI Architect at Microsoft Corp. "EMC technologies have helped fill the need, working seamlessly with Microsoft SQL Server to boost scalability, data replication and rapid backup."

"Sometimes we get caught up in exotic new solutions and forget about 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," said Brian Garrett, Vice President, ESG Lab, Enterprise Strategy Group. "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 EMC Solutions for Mission Critical
Microsoft SQL Server Environments
New reference architectures and applied technology best practices from EMC can help both meet customer needs to increase performance and improve availability and reliability and create a cost-efficient Microsoft SQL Server environment:

• Optimized Performance and Reduced Costs: Customers rely upon Microsoft SQL Server to run demanding applications such as online transaction processing (OLTP). EMC Symmetrix VMAX with Solid State Disks (enterprise flash drives) and EMC FAST  were deployed in a Microsoft SQL environment utilizing 30 fibre channel drives (FC). The deployment proved to reduce power and cooling costs up to 45 percent and increase the speed and performance of an OLTP application workload by up to 80 percent. This architecture was designed to compare against a deployment of 90 FC drives.
• Improved Availability and Reliability: Customers seek to fully extend the benefits of EMC VPLEX when deployed within a virtualized SQL Server environment. To help optimize 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.

Complimenting 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," said Michael O’Neill, Vice President of Alliances at EMC. "Our new solutions for SQL Server can help them confidently realize these goals and transform data assets into actionable information through guidance, applied technology best practices, and services."