HP and Microsoft announce a new Superdome X Reference Configuration Guide for SQL Server 2014
HP recently announced (see HP Announcement) the certification of the powerful scale-up Superdome X server. It is purposefully designed to support the most demanding, critical workloads for Windows Server and support for SQL Server as it is certified to run on Windows Server and provide support for SQL Server.
HP, in collaboration with Microsoft, is now releasing a new Reference Configuration for running Microsoft SQL Server in Superdome X. A Reference Configuration is a specific solution designation that includes a solution Bill of Material (BOM), deployment steps and sizing testing to help users efficiently deploy SQL Server on Superdome X. (Download the Reference Configuration guide: Here)
This solution will let customers scale-up their SQL Server environment to new heights. The just released Reference Configuration guide provides specific configuration details for scaling up SQL Server 2014 supporting large scale online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads on the HP Integrity Superdome X. Example configurations show scalability as 1, 2 and then 4 blades are used to size the SQL Server 2014 database workloads and provide comparison with previous server technology to highlight advancements made.
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 includes built-in in-memory capabilities optimized for each workload including OLTP, data warehousing, and business intelligence. The new in-memory OLTP engine can improve transaction throughput by up to 30x ,and significantly improve concurrency in parallel by running memory optimized tables and store procedures directly in-memory. In addition, SQL Server 2014 offers an enhanced in-memory ColumnStore that offers up 100x faster queries with much higher data compression. Whether you have a large number of concurrent, short-lived queries, or large and complex – Superdome X powerful architecture with up to 240 cores and 12 TB of RAM – will deliver the high performance and low latency required for decision support and business processing workloads. Mission critical SQL Server 2014 solutions not only include large system scale-up, but also SQL Server consolidation projects (for multi-instance consolidation) and multi-partition consolidation solutions. The HP Integrity Superdome X solution has the flexibility to power all of these mission critical environments.
Mission Critical HP Integrity Superdome X with SQL Server
The Reference Configuration Guide covers the specific case for running SQL Server 2014 on the HP Superdome X platform for a large, scale-up, tier 1 OLTP workload. The guide includes a detailed BOM necessary to best run these workloads with HP hardware and Microsoft software. Here is an example of the scalability for SQL Server you can find detailed in the guide.
You can now download the Reference Configuration Guide at: Reference Configuration Superdome X-SQL Server
To gain more familiarity on running Windows Server and SQL Server on this new server platform, there is a new refreshed white paper to help: Running Microsoft Windows Server-SQL Server on Superdome X
Stay tuned as we are continuing our work with HP to develop and test the next level of solutions with more Reference Configuration and Reference Architecture becoming live in the next few months.