Executive Summary; Fast Track Reference Architecture; Important Points And Caveats - HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Technical White Paper

Technical white paper | HP ProLiant DL980 G7 and P2000 G3 MSA Storage

Executive summary

Microsoft® SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse for Hewlett-Packard (HP) servers, storage and networking products
provides a prescriptive approach for balancing server, storage, network, and software configurations for architecting
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 data warehouse solutions. The reference architectures provide server and storage guidance for
various data warehouse workloads – giving you the most efficient hardware for your solution, saving you time and cost in
choosing the right technology, and giving you peace of mind that the right platform and architecture is in place.
Target audience: The target audience for this document consists of IT planners, architects, DBAs, CIOs, CTOs, and business
intelligence (BI) users with an interest in options for their BI applications and in the factors that affect those options.
This white paper describes testing performed by HP in April 2013

Fast Track reference architecture

This document is a reference architecture companion document to the Microsoft SQL Server Technical Article, "Fast Track
Data Warehouse Reference Guide for SQL Server 2012", which describes a repeatable architectural approach for
implementing a scalable model for a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP)-based Microsoft SQL Server 2012 data warehouse.
The end result of the process described in this companion document represents a recommended minimal SQL Server 2012
configuration, inclusive of all the software and hardware, required to achieve and maintain a baseline level of "out of box"
scalable performance when deploying SQL Server data warehousing (SSDW) sequential data access workload scenarios
versus traditional random I/O methods.
This document provides specific details about the configuration and bill of materials for one such Fast Track 4.0 reference
architecture, based on the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server using HP P2000 G3 MSA storage. This configuration is targeted at a
data warehouse or data mart environment with scan rate requirements of around 11-17GB/sec. It is optimized at up to
85TB of compressed user data capacity.

Important points and caveats

The configuration described here and the approach detailed in the reference architecture guide is exclusively designed
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for, and is only applicable to, sequential data workloads. Use of this approach on other workload types is not appropriate
and may yield configurations that are inefficient.
ALL recommendations and best practices defined in the reference architecture guide must be implemented in their
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entirety in order to preserve and maintain the sequential order of the data and sequential I/O against the data.
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