Dell DBAs User Manual
Modernize or Perish: Dell EMC™ Solutions for
Highlights
Microsoft® Azure® Stack HCI Throw a Lifeline
to Your Database Workloads
Prowess Consulting’s testing shows that Dell EMC AX-740xd nodes provide near-linear scalable
performance for Microsoft
Executive Summary
Data drives business, but businesses too often struggle to keep up. Nowhere is this
more evident than with databases. Business and IT leadership look to database
administrators (DBAs) to modernize the data estate, but DBAs are just trying
to coax performance out of their current infrastructure. Overall, IT today is held
back by legacy systems that grow ever more costly to operate, all while budgets
are shrinking. DBAs and IT leadership alike are wrestling with outdated data-
management solutions and processes, with results that hurt the organization
at large.
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) can act as a lifeline for organizations who
need to modernize. HCI promises to reduce expenses, increase agility, and simplify
operations, but the choice of HCI solution is crucial. For an HCI solution to be
effective, it needs to meet current and future performance needs while reducing total
cost of ownership (TCO) and management complexity.
®
SQL Server® 2019 coupled with modern manageability.
Performance that
scales with the cluster
Prowess Consulting evaluated one such solution, Dell EMC™ Solutions for
Microsoft® Azure® Stack HCI, with an eye toward performance and overall value.
Our testing and research showed that this Dell EMC HCI solution running
Microsoft® SQL Server® 2019 p rovides:
• Near-linear scalability and an overall level of performance that help ensure the
solution can meet both current and future performance needs.
• Lower TCO through a preinstalled, original equipment manufacturer (OEM)-
licensed operating system and database that saves on licensing costs and
accelerates deployment compared with volume licensing and manual installation.
• Modernization benets including greater reliability and cluster-aware, cloud-ready
management capabilities built into the solution.
Decommissioning legacy servers can free up IT budgets to be reallocated toward
innovation. Moving to AX nodes from Dell Technologies running Windows Server® 2019
and SQL Server 2019 can consolidate physical server footprint, simplify management,
and provide higher reliability for the workloads the business depends on.
Lower TCO and
faster time to value
compared with
volume licensing and
manual installation
Built-in, modern
management tools
The Challenge: Harnessing Data with Outdated,
Fraying Tools
It’s accepted wisdom that data powers business. However, that’s only partly true. Only data that can be harnessed,
processed, and presented can propel business. Doing this at the speed of business drives the need for ever greater
performance from databases. DBAs are at the front lines of this push for speed, but their roles and responsibilities only
continue to grow more complex. DBAs are under pressure to modernize their businesses’ data estates, particularly for
core database workloads. But their legacy infrastructure is not able to provide the levels of performance and latency
demanded by business. Worse, most of their organizations’ current infrastructures are too inexible to enable scalability,
even as they and the rest of IT are constantly asked to do more with less.
For their part, IT organizations are caught between the dual res of aging infrastructure and shrinking budgets. On
the one hand, the cost to operate legacy infrastructure is becoming prohibitive. On the other hand, do-it-yourself (DIY)
strategies for organizations doing their own infrastructure refreshes often lead to human error and can be time and
budget sinks.
These traditional IT environments are difcult to monitor, manage, and maintain. IT organizations contend with
antiquated, inexible management tools and manual, error-prone operational processes. IT needs management
capabilities that are familiar enough for technical staff to operate, yet powerful enough to provide a high degree
of automation and orchestration. In addition, many organizations are looking to make use of hybrid operations by
introducing monitoring and management functionality, delivered as a service from the public cloud, to supplement
or replace their existing management ecosystems.
Solution Overview: Dell EMC Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI
HCI can help organizations achieve their strategic goals with data modernization while “keeping the lights on” with
ongoing operations: compared to legacy IT infrastructure, HCI simplies deployment and operations, saves on costs
through a smaller footprint, and delivers higher performance. It also preserves choice for IT organizations by meeting
both current and future needs without forcing organizations to overprovision now to prepare for growth. However, it is
vital that IT organizations build on HCI clusters capable of continuing to meet SQL Server performance and availability
requirements as their SQL Server environments scale out. This infrastructure must predictably and linearly scale with
SQL Server workloads.
AX nodes from Dell Technologies deliver a broad, intelligently curated hyperconverged platform that can meet the
requirements of even the most demanding SQL Server workloads. The solution comes validated and certied to remove
the guesswork when building a modernized, business-critical database environment. Comprehensive management with
Dell EMC™ OpenManage™ Integration with Microsoft Windows® Admin Center, rapid time to value with
Dell EMC™ ProDeploy options, and solution-level Dell ProSupport™ complete this modernized portfolio.
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Key Results
Evaluation and load testing by Prowess Consulting show that this database solution provides:
• Near-linear scalability and performance—Each additional Dell EMC AX-740xd node provides nearly linear
additional performance for SQL Server workloads running on the expanding cluster. Running additional virtual
databases to Dell EMC AX-740xd nodes provides nearly the same performance as running those same virtual
machines (VMs) on dedicated servers.
• Lower TCO—Dell EMC AX-740xd nodes can come preinstalled with Windows Server 2019 and SQL 2019 software.1
OEM licensing of preinstalled operating systems can reduce licensing costs by up to 31 percent, while preinstallation
accelerates deployment up to 86 percent compared with volume licensing and manual installation.2 The included
support from Dell Technologies will reduce management effort and cost.
• Modernization benets—Moving legacy SQL Server workloads to new HCI hardware can improve performance
for business-critical databases and enable IT organizations to do more with less physical hardware and increase
database performance and reliability. This scalable performance makes Dell EMC AX-740xd nodes a great platform
for SQL Server. And the solution comes with additional modernization benets, such as Cluster-Aware Updating
and simple integration with Azure services, that are part of AX nodes from Dell Technologies. These
solutions make it easy for IT organizations to reap the benets of scale-out performance without greater
management complexity.
Scalability Details
Prowess Consulting’s goal in developing the test methodology for this study was to establish the linearity of performance
for a cluster of Dell EMC AX-740xd nodes under conditions similar to the workload scaling out. We designed our test
approach to simulate a real-world online transaction processing (OLTP) workload comparable to an enterprise-resource-
management (ERM) system that drives critical back-ofce operations.
Hyperconverged Incremental Load Testing
To test the hyperconverged systems, Prowess used an incremental load test that was designed to distribute load across
four Dell EMC AX-740xd nodes. For example, one virtualized database ran on each node in test 4, and two databases
ran on each node in test 8. Table 1 shows the incremental test plan with the distributed workload.
Tab l e 1. Test plan with the Microsoft® SQL Server® 2019 workload distributed across Dell EMC™ Solutions for Microsoft® Azure® Stack HCI with
Dell EMC AX-740xd nodes
Node 1 Node 2 Node 3 Node 4
VM 1 VM 2 VM 3 VM 4 VM 5 VM 6 VM 7 VM 8
Test 1 Active
Test 2 Active Active
Test 3 Active Active Active
Test 4 Active Active Active Active
Test 5 Active Active Active Active Active
Test 6 Active Active Active Active Active Active
Test 7 Active Active Active Active Active Active Active
Test 8 Active Active Active Active Active Active Active Active
For the testing, we used HammerDB to capture performance and utilization data. For more information, see Appendix C.
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