Hardware
HP ProLiant DL585
Taking the platinum award in the Hardware category is the powerhouse HP ProLiant
DL585 server, which won gold in 2006. "If you're looking for a rack-mounted
enterprise-class server," wrote Michael Otey in his SQL Server Magazine
product review (July 2006, InstantDoc ID 50266), "You can't go wrong with the
ProLiant DL585. The system's 4-way dual-core Opteron configuration provides
amazing performance, and HP's Insight Manager and [Integrated Lights-Out] iLO
enable effective remote management for enterprise deployments." The system is
a 132-pound, 4U rack-mounted server fueled by four AMD 880 Opteron dual-core
2.4GHz CPUs, with 2GB of RAM and an embedded Ultra3 Smart Array 5i drive connected
to four 36GB, 15,000rpm hard disks. The DL585 supports a maximum of 128GB of
RAM and offers two 64-bit 133MHz PCI Extended (PCI-X) slots, six 64-bit 100MHz
PCI-X slots, a 1GB dual-port NIC, two USB 2.0 ports, a slim-line floppy-disk
drive and CD-ROM combination unit, a serial port, and hot-pluggable redundant
power supplies. How effective is all this firepower? Michael wrote, "The system's
performance was stellar. In fact, I found it difficult to create a workload
that would stress the server." Contact HP at http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/prodserv/servers.html
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HP ProLiant DL380 G4
The gold award goes to another HP titan—the HP ProLiant DL380 G4 NAS
system, powered by new dual 3.6GHz Intel Xeon (Nocona) processors. The system
also features 1GB of SDRAM, three 36GB 15,000rpm hard disks, a Smart Array 6i
SCSI RAID controller, three PCI-X slots, and a hot-swappable 550W power supply.
The September 2006 issue of SQL Server Magazine featured the DL380 G4
in the "Network Attached Storage" Buyer's Guide (InstantDoc ID 92718). David
Chernicoff, SQL Server Magazine contributing editor, wrote, "mid-
to high-end NAS machines [like the ProLiant DL380 G4] are often perfect candidates
for providing storage for SQL Server." The ProLiant DL380 G4 gives you large
amounts of local caching and memory capabilities, offers tremendous horsepower,
and boasts completely hardware-redundant fault tolerance. HP seems to be positioning
the ProLiant DL380 G4 in the SQL Server market to play to the strength of the
system: It's an easily accessible, large-capacity server complete with software
that simplifies SQL Server backup and restoration. Online, disk-based backup
continues to get more and more economically practical, David wrote, particularly
"as the cost of storage continues to decline." Using the ProLiant DL380 G4 in
a NAS scenario allows complete data protection without affecting the real-time
performance of the SQL Server database. Contact HP at http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/prodserv/servers.html
—Jason Bovberg
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Storage
IBM System Storage N5000 Modular Disk Storage Systems
This year's platinum winner in the Storage category is the IBM System Storage
N5000 Modular Disk Storage Systems series of storage appliances. According to
IBM's Worldwide Product Marketing Manager David Vaughn, the product has two
essential pieces of software that help you manage SQL Server. The first is SnapManager
for SQL Server. "This software runs on SQL Server and makes it easy to administer
SQL Server administration activities. You can easily set up snapshots and create
backups to whatever storage medium you want. You can also specify when you want
the data to be backed up." You can use the second piece of software, SnapVault,
if you want to migrate snapshots to lower-cost storage (e.g., as backups age).
"IBM System Storage N5000 provides more than just a storage product," David
says. "It includes the software to make it easier to use for back-end storage
for SQL Server." In addition to the product's software capabilities, you also
have the flexibility to choose either Fibre Channel or SATA disk drives. If
you need to store a lot of data in SQL Server, then IBM System Storage N5000
can fill the bill, providing as much as 252TB of raw storage capacity. Contact
IBM at http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/network/n5000/appliance
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EMC CLARiiON CX300
The gold winner in the Storage category is the EMC CLARiiON CX300 networked
storage system, which was built for high-performance data-intensive applications
such as SQL Server. The CLARiiON CX300 is a great choice for the SQL Server
environment because it gives enterprises the capacity they need (ranging from
365GB to 27TB) and features built-in high availability to ensure that data is
always available when it's needed. Product Marketing Manager for the CLARiiON
CX300 Phil Treide says, "The product has the ability for tiering within the
system, meaning that you can choose a mix of Fibre Channel or SATA drives. What's
also unique to CLARiiON, and what helps differentiate us, is our data-in-place
upgrade capability, which allows you to upgrade to higher-end CLARiiON systems
while maintaining your investment in your current CLARiiON system." This storage
system can be implemented as a standalone or a rack-mounted unit and features
NAS, SAN, and DAS deployment options. Contact EMC at http://www.emc.com/products/systems/clariion_cx300.jsp
—Blake Eno
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Most Innovative Technology
Texas Memory Systems RamSan-300
This year, we designate Texas Memory Systems' RamSan-300 winner of a special
category: Most Innovative Technology. This entry-level solid state disk (SSD)
uses Double Data Rate (DDR) RAM memory rather than hard disks for storage. Although
the RamSan-300 looks like a regular disk drive to the OS, it lets applications
access storage significantly faster than traditional storage methods do, accelerating
enterprise applications such as online transaction processing (OLTP) databases,
batch processes, and data warehouses by as much as 2,500 percent.
I spoke to Dave Thornley, Service Support Manager of Learning and IT Services
at Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield, UK, about why his organization
chose the RamSan300. Sheffield Hallam University is the sixth largest university
in the UK, with three locations and approximately 7,000 PCs and 300 servers
running a mixture of Windows, Sun Solaris, Novell NetWare, and Linux. Both SQL
Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 provide production database services. SQL Server
is deployed on a few servers to provide local database support for applications
that can't run on the clusters. According to Dave, Sheffield Hallam University
selected the RamSan300 to address the performance issues of one application
that was based on a locally installed copy of SQL Server. During an 8- to 10-week
busy period each year, the application's I/O load would increase to exceed the
mechanical disk's capacity, resulting in disk queues of more than 100 operations
and occasional SQL Server wait times of more than 5 or 10 minutes. Dave says,
"We knew we could achieve incremental improvements in disk I/O performance by
tweaking SQL Server but decided we needed an improvement of several orders of
magnitude to lift the application performance to an acceptable level—hence
the selection of the RamSan-300."
And the SSD's performance "has been impressive," according to Dave. "Observed
random I/O rates on the disk have been three to four times higher than on mechanical
disk, and the application now performs consistently all year round."
Dave explains that when his organization was searching for an SSD storage solution
about a year ago, the RamSan-300 seemed to offer the best speed advantage. And
as Woody Hutsell, Texas Memory Systems executive vice president claims, this
SSD "is a solution that makes sense for small-to-midsized enterprises [because]
it pays off in price per performance." Contact Texas Memory Systems at http://www.superssd.com/products/ramsan-300
—Lavon Peters
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