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Microsoft SQL Server 2008 offers licensing advantages for increased savings, consolidation feature enhancements that help provide increased savings, improved high availability capabilities to meet aggregated availability needs and effective management of security needs such as strong authentication and access control, powerful encryption and key management capabilities, and enhanced auditing.
Optimize storage and increased performance with built-in data compression and backup compression
Control workload resource prioritization with Resource Governor
Use virtualization to do consolidation
Centralize security auditing with new comprehensive data auditing capabilities
Enforce policy compliance consistently across the enterprise with Policy-Based Management
Centrally collect and monitor your severs with data collector and management data warehouse
Choose an enterprise class data platform to help provide low TCO. Use SQL Server Enterprise (EE) to maximize the savings you can achieve:
Take advantage of EE’s special licensing conditions
Use compression to reduce storage costs
Make use of resource governor to achieve predictable performance
Meet the higher aggregated availability needs
Take advantage of comprehensive built-in BI
Reduce the number of servers in your enterprise
Reduce your organization’s carbon footprint.
Use the features of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise to help provide high availability, improve performance, reduce licensing costs
Use supports for 64-bit hardware
Scale up to OS maximum processors
Scale up to OS maximum memory
Add capacity without incurring downtime by using hot-add CPUs and memory modules
Improve performance
Minimize media storage requirements
Speed up backup and restores operations
Back up databases with a smaller window
Reduce hardware costs
Optimize disk usage
Improve performance by compressing data
Specify CPU and memory usage limits for defined workloads
Prevent applications from monopolizing resources
Avoid runaway queries
Prioritize workloads so that important tasks execute more quickly and reliably
Help ensure that your servers are highly available with SQL Server clustering
Use up to 16 nodes using N+1 clustering
Realize higher ROI by making optimal use of server hardware
Help protect databases and prevent data loss using database mirroring with automatic failover and transparent client re-direction Take advantage of asynchronous database mirroring for higher mirroring performance and multi site DR
Scale out with high availability using transactional replication
Choose a data transfer approach to consolidate data from a range of heterogeneous sources onto SQL Server 2008: Backup/restore and detach/attach for SQL Server databases
SQL Server Integration Services for ETL operations and imports from other technologies, including Oracle, DB2, SAP BI, and Teradata
Easy Tools to upgrade from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2008 or from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008
Use SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor to identify and resolve upgrade issues in advance
Improve concurrency by using the LOCK_ESCALATION setting on a table
Benefit from improved concurrency on partitioned tables
Reduce disk contention by organizing tables and indexes into partitions and switching in and out of these partitions individually
Use a snapshot of a database mirror as a source for reporting data and avoid spanning queries on production OLTP tables
Encrypt data without having to modify your applications by using Transparent Database Encryption (TDE)
Simplify and consolidate encryption and key management through EE’s support for extensible key management
Use security principals at the database, server, and operating system levels to control access to data
Use SQL Audit to track changes to data and database schemas, and to consolidate enterprise-wide audit records
Choose the consolidation option that is best suited to your business:
Use SQL Server 2008 to host multiple databases in a single server instance to centralize data storage and management
Run multiple instances of SQL Server 2008 on a single server to enable the isolation of database applications while reducing hardware costs, energy use, licensing costs, and administrative overhead
Run multiple SQL Server 2008 instances on the same physical computer using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role, with one or more instances of SQL Server 2008 services in each virtual machine
Take advantage of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise licensing: run an unlimited number of virtual database servers
With SQL Server 2008 EE license mobility; reassign existing SQL Server 2008 licenses across servers in a server farm
Choose the right data transfer approach to consolidate data from a wide range of technologies in SQL Server 2008, including:
Backup and restore
Attach and detach
SQL Server Integration Services
Upgrade existing SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 databases directly to SQL Server 2008
SQL Server Management Studio
Policy-Based Management
Manage, monitor, secure, and optimize consolidated data systems effectively.
Use a single, consistent management interface to manage multiple instances on a single server and multiple SQL Server instances on different virtual machines
Manage instances of SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, and SQL Server 2008 in every edition including Enterprise, Standard, Workgroup, and Express
Manage the SQL Server Database Engine, SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Integration Services, and SQL Server Reporting Services
Configure auditing settings at the server and database levels on one server instance, and then deploy them to others
Consolidate enterprise-wide audit records from multiple sources such as SQL Server, Analysis Services and Reporting Services
Use Policy-Based Management to define configuration policies and apply them to servers, databases, tables, and other targets, thus consolidating configuration management by defining a policy once and reusing it across servers throughout the enterprise
Enforce policies automatically or through ad hoc checks
Use support for third-party cryptographic providers to simplify and consolidate encryption and key management across applications and services within your organization
Use Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to provide centralized hardware- based encryption and key management
Use SQL Server’s out-of-the-box Business Intelligence (BI) functionality to gain better business insights and drive profitability.
Consolidate BI on a single platform for improved interoperability and manageability with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
Perform sophisticated data analysis, data mining, and extract transform and load (ETL) operations and create, manage, and distribute rich, visually compelling reports
Use Report Builder 2.0 to put report creation directly into the hands of information workers
SQL Server is one of the most widely used enterprise database product, with a huge number of trained professionals available to assist with your consolidation project and ongoing support.
Server Consolidation
