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Home > What To Look for in Modern Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Power SQL Server With Best-in-Class Infrastructure

SQL Server Is Here to Stay
Microsoft SQL Server is a popular database platform for the key applications many organizations depend on to run their business. Its ubiquity and utility are made clear with these two statistics: More than 40% of all developers work with SQL Server, according to Statista,1 and more than 180,000 companies use it, based on data from Enlyft,2 including every enterprise-class business. SQL Server is the database for numerous mission-critical applications.

The use of SQL Server on premises will continue to accommodate applications governed by privacy, sovereignty and compliance demands. In such cases, organizations need to ensure they have high-performing, resilient and secure infrastructure.

Massive Growth in Apps and Data
In the future, SQL Server applications will move well beyond standard, simple queries and reporting. New use cases that use artificial intelligence, big data and other applications that generate large data sets will need much larger memory and cache to support such workloads. Without an infrastructure upgrade, many SQL Server deployments may not have the necessary performance to be responsive, and even traditional workloads will be impacted. Now is the time to get your infrastructure ready for the future.

When deciding on an upgrade to SQL Server infrastructure, it is important to explore these critical capabilities:

  • Performance: It is essential to look beyond raw performance numbers. For example, how much “work” per watt does the infrastructure provide? Does the infrastructure use data center space efficiently? Are you using lower core, high frequency CPUs? SQL Server is priced on a per-core basis. Of course, scalability is essential, but it must be granular and give IT numerous options to ensure that performance can be gained without incurring high costs for hardware, power, software licenses, space and more.
  • Resiliency: SQL Server infrastructure, both now and in the future, is going to need to be resilient and reliable. Look for a management platform that can proactively identify potential faults. The solution should fully integrate compute, storage and network resources to give administrators a comprehensive understanding of infrastructure utilization to help mitigate any bottlenecks that might occur.
  • Next-generation operations: The management platform should make it possible to easily utilize new features and capabilities as they become available. It should be able to monitor performance issues and dynamically optimize resources to achieve performance goals.

Embrace a Modern SQL Server Solution
Organizations of all sizes continue to rely on SQL Server for their database needs. The explosive growth in applications and data will likely require an upgrade to SQL Server infrastructure to deliver excellent end-user experiences.

Cisco UCS and HyperFlex systems, powered by AMD EPYC processors, provide outstanding performance for all types of workloads and have achieved world-record performance on the TPC-H benchmark, a common benchmark used to measure database performance. Cisco validates SQL Server solutions to help accelerate deployments, ensure resiliency and achieve performance expectations.

Cisco Intersight is a cloud operations platform that seamlessly delivers continuous innovation and new functionality via software as a service. Maintaining the health of SQL environments is an important task and requires constant monitoring. Cisco Intersight offers a range of capabilities to help optimize SQL environments—from creating security policies, to operating system upgrades, to workload monitoring, sizing and placement for cost optimization and performance. Intersight also provides holistic management and capacity monitoring of the entire infrastructure stack—compute, network and storage—giving IT a view of utilization trends for better capacity planning.  

Does it make a difference what server you choose when considering Microsoft SQL Server? The answer is an emphatic yes. Cisco UCS-based systems offer the performance and operational capabilities outlined above as well as the resiliency required for SQL Server infrastructure. In fact, Cisco has set numerous performance records for SQL Server performance benchmarks.

IT teams can leverage Cisco Intersight real-time analytics to optimize SQL Server infrastructure. This ensures infrastructure outlays are as efficient as possible. In addition to the encryption and data protection features in the joint Cisco-AMD solution, Cisco offers an option for “hardening” SQL Server.  For more information, please go to: www.cisco.com/c/m/en_us/solutions/computing/ucs-amd.html

1 “Database Software – Statistics & Facts,” Statista, Feb 7, 2022
2 “Companies Using Microsoft SQL Server,” Enlyft, 2022

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