EMCs Microsoft Solutions Team recently released a white paper highlighting the benefits of XtremIO combined with Microsoft SQL Server 2012/2014 running in a VMware vSphere environment. Xtrem Performance. It also represents a crossroads for me personally; after all, I started my blogging over at www.insidethepartnership.com focused on the EMC/Microsoft Partnership. What better way to come full circle than with an Xtrem performance and efficiency white paper.
Looking at common challenges seen by Microsoft SQL Administrators, how can XtremIO accelerate database performance and enable consistent predictable performance at scale while enabling additional functionality?
Let’s start with performance. Flash is fast, that’s a given, and I’ve blogged about that many times. Delivering consistent performance at scale can be the challenge. XtremIO Scale-Out Architecture proved to deliver consistent sub millisecond latency, consistently and predictably, regardless of how busy the system is and regardless of capacity utilization. XtremIOs unique In-Memory Architecture also proved to deliver additional performance and capacity linearly, ensuring that all X-Bricks in the configuration maintained the same low consistent latency, a key attribute to enable Flash.
Validating performance was a key attribute of the recent whitepaper. Using a standard TPC-E workload (Financial Market Simulation) a single database easily generated 15,000 IOPS at 700 Microsecond (0.7Millisecond) Latency. Remember, that’s with all data services turned on (Thin Provisioned, Protected, Deduplication and Compressed!) That’s the power of In-Memory Metadata. Add 4 more databases (5 total), 57,0000 IOPS, 5 more (10 total) 160,000 IOPS. 11 Hours later… still 160,000 IOPS latency sub millisecond – and that’s NOT “average” latency. That’s Linear Scale! Here is a quick video showing the results of the performance test.
XtremIO, Microsoft SQL Server Performance Test
Performance… Check! What about enhanced efficiencies for Microsoft SQL Server? One of XtremIOs value props is the efficiencies enabled by its in-line data services. Services like Deduplication and Compression that are always-on, always-inline and always in memory, designed to extend the life of Flash and maintain consistent predictable performance. Add to that Writeable Snaps capable of creating many copies of your production database with a small storage footprint (Deduplication/Compression) all maintaining the same performance of production (In-Memory Metadata); thus providing the ability to consolidate the most complex database designs, think test/dev, data warehousing, business intelligence and application workloads environments. That alone has the ability to change the way you design your databases and deploy your applications. Every copy of your database gets the same performance as production, without impacting performance of production. Add to that the fact that Deduplication Rates and Compression will reduce your overall footprint 10 fold (depending on the number of copies). The second demonstration highlights the efficiencies enabled by XtremIO.
XtremIO, Microsoft SQL Server Efficiently Test
Performance… Check! Efficiencies… Check! What about efficiencies and performance or snapshots at full production performance without impacting production? That’s exactly what the third test was designed to prove, and yes, we proved it!
XtremIO, Microsoft SQL Server Efficiently at Performance Test
Download the full whitepaper here!
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