Give your SQL Server 2022 superpowers with HPE infrastructure

[StorageExperts]

Mission Critical SQL Server on HPE Superdome Flex 280 and HPE Alletra 9000 storage provides the highest levels of performance and 100% guaranteed availability for SQL Server 2022.

-By Mike Harding, HPE Storage

Does you feel like data growth is sending you into some quantum realm? It’s a place where the need for scale and performance has stretched your equipment, staff, and budget beyond their limits. Fortunately for enterprise databases, there’s the new SQL Server 2022 – and along with it, leading high-performance infrastructure solutions that boost the related enterprise applications with the superpowers to stay on top of data growth, while meeting and exceeding business requirements.

The Mission Critical SQL Server solution from HPE delivers just these superpowers. The combination of benchmark-beating scale-up compute and data storage with guaranteed data availability is proving it can make heroes out of the IT teams that deploy it.

The mission-critical database computing origin story

If you use Microsoft SQL Server to manage critical transactional or analytic workloads, you have likely experienced firsthand how the growing size and importance of databases in digital business can lead to infrastructure challenges. As databases grow larger, limits are hit, and bottlenecks occur. At best, application performance suffers. At worst, systems crash and business stops. 

At the same time, the role of IT has evolved from the meek, mild-mannered technologist that kept the systems going, to now having a seat at the leadership table and driving the digital transformation agenda. In that quest, only the most capable allies were entrusted to help ensure system availability, security, and TCO optimization.  HPE has a proven track record as a technology partner for the world largest organizations. As a prime example, we've been parntering with Microsoft for over the past 30 years, collaborating on products such as SQL Server.

What’s at the power core of Mission Critical SQL Server?

Mission Critical SQL Server is the HPE solution that delivers the highest levels of performance, scalability, and availability for your most important enterprise databases. The key elements are the HPE Superdome Flex 280, HPE Alletra 9000 storage and SQL Server 2022.

Exactly how to deploy these elements to maximize the power of the solution has been captured in a new Reference Architecture for OLTP deployments. This technical whitepaper documents best practices as well as related performance testing. There are test results from 2-to-4 socket scaling, as well as tests relating to SQL Server engine improvements. But most importantly it’s a guide with the best practices for configuring SQL Server on an HPE Superdome Flex 280 and HPE Alletra 9000 environment, including a bill of materials and other valuable component details.

World performance benchmark conquered by HPE Superdome Flex 280

The power core of this solution is the HPE Superdome Flex 280 system. It recently achieved record SQL Server performance, with a #1 overall world record for the TPC-H benchmark at a non-clustered 100TB scale.¹ The 100TB scale factor is the largest TPC-H test database size available, and it speaks to the unmatched, scale-up abilities of the HPE Superdome Flex 280.

The HPE Superdome Flex server family guards against downtime from the component level, up the technology stack, and to the mission-critical services it delivers. It can self-repair with best-in-class predictive fault handling and reporting, it has unique reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features that contain errors at the system level before they can interrupt services, and has enhanced memory reliability including proactive memory scrubbing and HPE Fast Fault Tolerance.

The latest step along the timeline of enterprise storage

HPE Alletra 9000 is ideal for mission-critical workloads, able to meet extreme latency sensitivity and availability requirements. It has a unique multi-node, all-active architecture for massive parallelization resulting in consistent and predictable performance at scale. And it comes with a 100% availability guarantee.² With all-NVMe, HPE Alletra 9000 delivers best-in-class performance density with over 2 million IOPS.³

And now for the fourth year in a row, HPE has been named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Primary Storage.⁴  Get the storage performance, scale, and density you need for the most demanding SQL Server environments.

Calling all superheroes

Optimize your SQL Server infrastructure to scale beyond current limits, boost performance, and increase high availability and security with the new Mission Critical SQL Server solution from HPE.

HPE solutions for SQL Server deliver unique scale-up capabilities, RAS features, and leadership performance to solve your key business challenges around the growing size and criticality of SQL Server databases. With the HPE Superdome Flex server family, you can optimize price-performance, scale to any size, and help ensure high availability and security.

Get the new reference architecture with the how-to guidance to build your own record-breaking mission critical SQL Server environment, and make yourself a hero in the eyes of your organization: HPE Reference Architecture for mission critical Microsoft SQL Server 2022 on HPE Superdome Flex 280 and HPE Alletra 9000 storage

Sources:

1. Results as of October 3, 2022, Subject to related configurations and fair use information. https://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_result_detail5.asp?id=122032101
2. 100% Availability Guarantee Solution Brief
3. Based on HPE internal testing for HPE Alletra 9000 with TPVV, RAID6, 8KiB Random Reads
4. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage, October 2022]

---

Meet Storage Experts blogger Mike Harding, HPE Storage

Mike focuses on launching and growing new enterprise technology offerings.

Storage Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

twitter.com/HPE_Storage
linkedin.com/showcase/hpestorage/
hpe.com/storage