4-page Case Study - Posted 2/26/2008
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Siemens PLM Software Validated to Easily Support 5,000 Users with SQL Server 2008
Siemens PLM Software scales to 5,000 concurrent users and gains 50 percent compression for database files running on SQL Server® 2008 and Windows Server® 2008 and Intel®-based hardware.
Business Needs
Siemens PLM Software, a business unit within the Siemens Industry Sector, is a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) products and services, including its Teamcenter® solution.
Teamcenter 2007 is a suite of digital lifecycle management solutions that helps organizations power innovation and improve productivity by connecting people with the product and process knowledge they need to effectively function in a globally oriented product lifecycle.
With nearly 4 million licensed seats of Teamcenter at 47,000 customers worldwide, the company prides itself in providing the world’s most widely used PLM system. Though Teamcenter can run on a number of operating systems and database management systems, the company sees increasing demand for deploying Teamcenter using the Microsoft® Application Platform, including SQL Server® database software.
To meet customer needs, Siemens needed to certify Teamcenter would operate on SQL Server 2008.
Solution
Siemens engineers visited the Microsoft Engineering Excellence Center Laboratory in Redmond, Washington to conduct their own heavy-load tests of Teamcenter running on SQL Server 2008 Enterprise (64-bit) and the Windows Server 2008 for 64-Bit Systems operating system, running on Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors.
“We’re proud of our testing,” says David Mitchell, Chief Technical Officer, Teamcenter, Siemens PLM Software. “Using desktops logged in through a load balancer to a set of Web servers, we used load cannons to simulate 5,000 concurrent users. We used a 50/50 split between reads and writes, while in normal operations you’d expect to see only about 10 percent writes.”
Benefits
Teamcenter upgraded seamlessly to SQL Server 2008 and provided enhanced performance compared to SQL Server 2005. Testing identified benefits, including:
- Faster Response Rate. Testing found a 20 percent improvement over SQL Server 2005 in average database response times.
- High Concurrency for Scalability. The Siemens team found that with SQL Server 2008, Teamcenter “easily scales” to 5,000 concurrent users. Even at peak loads the testing found only a 20.75 percent CPU utilization. “The ability to support 5,000 concurrent users translates into the ability to easily serve a 50,000-seat deployment,” says Mitchell. “This is because organizations typically see only 10 percent of potential users concurrently using the system.”
- CPU and RAM Savings. SQL Server 2008 showed a 10 percent reduction in CPU utilization during peak usage and a 5 percent reduction in RAM usage compared to SQL Server 2005.
- Compression. Testing found that the Data Compression feature of SQL Server 2008 provided an average of 50 percent compression —while only increasing CPU overhead by 1 to 2 percent. “Our customers will benefit from compression in SQL Server 2008,” says Mitchell. “With SQL Server 2008 we’re excited about compression and how it can be used to reduce disk space needs.”
- Low TCO. The impressive test results were accomplished using industry-standard hardware powered by Intel® Xeon® Quad-Core processors. The SQL Server processor licensing model only charges per processor, regardless of the number of cores. Mitchell notes: “The ability to use readily available hardware and the Microsoft Application Platform provides a low TCO for deploying our PLM software.”
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In summary, Siemens testing found a number of benefits to deploying its software on SQL Server 2008 running on Quad-Core Intel Xeon 7300 processors.
“Certifying SQL Server 2008 was important to us because more and more of our customers want to deploy our PLM solution using the Microsoft Application Platform,” says Christian Kelley, Vice President, Partner and Platform Marketing, Siemens PLM Software. “Our testing demonstrates that SQL Server 2008 provides Enterprise-class performance—with a low total cost of ownership.”
Microsoft SQL Server 2008
SQL Server 2008 is a secure, reliable and scalable platform for business critical applications with transparent encryption, comprehensive auditing and enhanced mirroring, while reducing the time and cost of managing data with enterprise wide policies. SQL Server simplifies development of data driven applications with integration of Visual Studio and .NET Framework, support for any type of data, and consistent storage from the device to the data center. SQL Server delivers the right information to all users with advanced visualizations, powerful reports and integrated analysis.
For more information about SQL Server 2008, go to: www.microsoft.com/sqlserver
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published February 2008
