Hi, I am Steve Wort from the SQL Server Appliance Engineering team. I wanted to give you a quick tour of the HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance Optimized for SQL Server. This Appliance is a the ideal solution for consolidating your SQL Server workload.
The Appliance is available in Half Rack, Full Rack, and Multi Rack configurations. The full rack configuration seen in the video has 192 Processor Cores, 2 TB RAM, 396 Disk Drives, 57TB Raw disk space, 25TB formatted disk space, and 60,000 Random 8KB IOPS at 60% Read, 40% Write. The full rack is able to run up to 1000 workloads, we expect customers will run between 200 and 400 database workloads on each rack.
The software stack on the appliance starts with Windows Server 2008 R2 Data Center Edition, where we enable the Hyper-V role to provide a virtualization layer. We then install SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition, and many products from the System Center Data Center Suite, including Operations Manager 2007 R2, Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, Configuration Manager 2007 R3, Data Protection Manager 2010, and Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal 2.0 SP1. The appliance is delivered to customers with more than 25 different software products integrated and operational.
The Disaster Recovery capabilities of this appliance start with adding a second appliance in a remote location, and leveraging proven SQL Server technologies for DR such as Database Mirroring, or Replication to provide DR capabilities to individual Virtual Machines.
The High Availability capabilities of the appliance are built into the hardware from the ground up, with no Single Point Of Failure within the hardware. The video concludes with a practical demonstration of HA at work as you watch me removing half of the disk drives from one of the drive arrays. This is the same drive array that is currently hosting the VHD for a VM running an OLTP workload. You can see the drives being removed, and watch as the VM continues to operate, with no observable impact on performance.
Stay up to date on the latest from the SQL Server Appliance Engineering team at: http://blogs.technet.com/b/sqlaeteam/.
Cheers,
Steve Wort
Senior Program Manager
SQL Server Appliance Engineering Team