Introduction to Data Services
Is This for You? The Data Services document set is written to meet the requirements of information technology (IT) professionals who are responsible for the design of a complete service architecture, including planning, design, deployment, and operations of data services in enterprise, corporate, or branch office environments. The readers of this document set are expected to have an understanding of its technical details; however, service-level expertise is not needed to follow the enterprise-level discussions and to understand the decisions that are made.
On This Page
 | Introduction |
| Blueprint |
| Planning Guide |
| Build Guide |
| Operations Guide |
Introduction
Most enterprise organizations are required to provide data services on a 24x7 basis, which means keeping the infrastructure, data, and services online with minimal downtime. Meeting these requirements becomes more complicated when parts of the database system infrastructure have different origins and require highly skilled maintenance personnel. The foremost requirements of data services are for availability, security, and scalability. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 can meet these requirements in enterprise environments through its ability to:
| • | Provide multiple levels of security. |
| • | Address large memory spaces. |
| • | Support large databases. |
| • | Support clustered and fault tolerant databases. |
A data services infrastructure aims to address the data services requirements for most contemporary commercial organizations, including those that provide e-commerce, data warehousing, data mining, and online transaction processing (OLTP) services in distributed organizations. These organizations need to maintain a large number of records in one place and provide mechanisms to access and update those records efficiently. Some of this data contains sensitive organizational information, which raises other requirements of security and business continuity. The Microsoft Windows Server System Reference Architecture (WSSRA) Data Services architecture is a scenario-based design that establishes baseline architecture for planning, design, implementation, and operations using a base scenario for building a consolidated data service that can be secure, highly available, and easily managed. The baseline scenario used in the WSSRA Data Service instantiation is described below. Through an IT systems audit, a number of departmental data stores that are not part of the primary IT infrastructure (for example, shadow apps, unsupported databases, business-critical databases running outside of the IT operations environments) have been found to be performing business-critical functions and/or housing business-critical data. Management requires the implementation of service best practices that require defined levels of security, performance, scalability, availability, and manageability of their business and mission-critical computer systems. To address this, management has initiated a consolidation program that requires all business and mission-critical data stores and associated applications to be part of the primary IT infrastructure. Infrastructure architects need to design a data services environment to enable this to take place, and infrastructure and operations teams will be implementing and maintaining the data services design. To provide an environment for the breadth of database services necessary for application transaction and storage as well as business intelligence creation, the infrastructure architects must design a data service that includes:
| • | Online transaction processing |
| • | Data warehouse |
| • | Data stores |
| • | Mobile data store |
The consolidation process will move data stores and applications to a managed environment, so the IT services department needs to also consider performance and reliability requirements in the design process.
Further information about design and deployment of data services may be found at the following URLs:
| • | “Windows Server 2003 Server Cluster Architecture” |
| • | “High Availability” |
| • | “Split-Mirror Backup and Restore” |
| • | “Windows Server 2003 Benchmarks” |
Blueprint
This blueprint provides design guidance on the WSSRA data services solution. It discusses the design criteria and various implementation considerations for deploying secure, scalable, manageable, and reliable data services in the enterprise.
Planning Guide
This guide addresses the decisions made during the design process for data solutions for the Contoso case study.
Build Guide
This guide provides installation, configuration, and test guidance for the SQL Server 2000 database servers in the test lab.
Operations Guide
This guide provides operations references for the data services described in WSSRA.