Customers, partners and members of the HPE Community converged on Las Vegas this past week for Discover 2019. It’s the company’s largest customer event which provides hands-on learning and training on HPE products as well as direct contact with members of the teams who make them.
One of the topics covered in the show was Hybrid cloud, and how to keep important data protected and available. New performance statistics were released from recent testing, with one of them relating to Microsoft SQL Server. This comes at a time when the company has released an update to Recovery Manager Central for SQL Server (RMC-S), which has been a popular means to ensure Application consistent database copies.
HPE Storage solutions for MS SQL Server
HPE has been investing to deliver outstanding levels of both Performance and Manageability for SQL Server. First off, HPE Data Storage makes SQL Server Faster. HPE has multiple lines of All-Flash storage arrays HPE 3PAR StoreServ, HPE Nimble Storage, and now the all new HPE Primera, that let you run Microsoft SQL Server in production at the highest levels of performance and availability. With HPE flash storage you get reliably fast performance: up to 3.8 million IOPS (I/Os per second) on 3PAR, and about 2 million IOPS on a cluster of Nimble storage all-flash arrays. And all at a consistent sub-millisecond latency.
Recently we added to this performance boost with the addition of Memory-Driven Flash. This is an all-flash array with an NVMe Storage Class Memory (SCM) cache. Recent testing with a SQL Server database on Memory-Driven Flash has shown a 59% decrease in latency (sec/read) compared to when SCM is disabled. Decreased latency translates to faster database query responses and a better user experience.
We’ve also invested to make SQL Server administration better. HPE delivers the most consistent availability with Intelligent Storage and HPE InfoSight, delivering 99.9999% guarenteed uptime. This means your data remains available, and in the rare event that there is an issue, the storage proactively alerts you to potential problems. HPE Storage comes with copy data management capabilities, and extends them across your hybrid cloud. It’s easy to create SQL-consistent snapshots or archival copies to Azure. HPE Storage arrays support data workflows and tasks that can manage live copies on and off-premises for DR, test/dev, reporting, analytics, patching, & upgrading. And HPE Storage enhances SQL Server DevOps as we are the only vendor to offer rich data services for both Windows and Linux Containers, and have interop with all the leading container platforms including Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos. HPE storage was the first to provide persistent volumes for containers.
How Recovery Manager Central improves SQL Server data protection
HPE Recovery Manager Central software, and specifically the RMC-S plug-in, allows SQL Server administrators to protect SQL Server instances and databases with application-consistent recovery points. The snapshots are managed on HPE 3PAR storage, and you can use RMC-S with either HPE StoreOnce, HPE Data Protector, Symantec NetBackup, or Symantec Backup Exec to protect and restore these snapshots.
Recent testing has shown that creating a database clone with RMC-S takes just 1 minute and 22 seconds. This is compared to the traditional and very manual process of creating a clone with SQL Server which can take 45 mins. The automated process of RMC vastly outperforms the manual process of creating new database, copying the schema, and then inserting and verifying data within every individual table. Compared to the traditional approach, RMC-S lets you copy a database in one step and 32 times faster.
Where to get more info
There’s much more information available on the advantages of HPE storage for Microsoft SQL Server, as well as for all the important Microsoft business workloads such as Windows Server, Exchange and newer solutions like Azure Stack and Azure Stack HCI. Here are some key resources below:
• Webinar: Get more from your Data with HPE Microsoft Storage solutions
• Reference Architecture: Microsoft SQL Server with HPE 3PAR Memory-Driven Flash
• Blog: Cut SQL Server Latency in Half with Memory-Driven Flash Storage
• HPE Storage Microsoft Solutions webpage: HPE.com/storage/microsoft
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