Act faster on massive SQL Server data volumes with HPE Superdome Flex 280

[ComputeExperts]

Many organizations dealing with explosive data growth choose SQL Server to power critical decision support systems. Learn how HPE Superdome Flex 280 and SQL Server deliver record performance at massive scale.

In our fast-paced and highly connected world, organizations must be ready to respond quickly to sudden and massive change. If you are implementing a data-first strategy, you need fast access to the right data in order to make timely decisions. Make decisions based on aged or incomplete information, and you could end up choosing the wrong investments or a less efficient route to market.

Organizations across retail, banking, manufacturing, and other industries use decision support systems that combine data from many sources and analyze it to help the business guide the decision process. Recent trends including supply chain challenges, post-pandemic digital disruption, and the rising expectations of consumers have sharpened the focus around accelerating that process.

For example at the enterprise level, according to IDC , 70% of companies want to use data to improve supply chain visibility, while 80% are looking for ways to be more agile. From an end customer point of view, a recent Deloitte study[i] indicates that 96% of consumers said they now expect a seamless experience across channels. Meeting these demands requires faster insights in the face of relentlessly growing data.

One way to speed insights is to build a performant and scalable decision support system. Many organizations choose Microsoft SQL Server for these systems because of its performance and security capabilities, as well as the diversity and quality of the Microsoft ecosystem and tools. And for database workloads that run best on scale-up systems—as those which handle large data volumes often do—SQL Server offers a proven ability to make efficient use of new IT resources, delivering high performance as the system scales.

A proven way to handle overwhelming SQL Server data volumes is to modernize with HPE Superdome Flex 280, a mission-critical platform that scales cost-efficiently by starting at two 3^rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and scaling up to eight in a single system.

Superdome Flex 280 increases the SQL Server advantage with:

• High performance when time sensitive actions are essential
• Enough compute resources including memory, processor cores and I/O devices, to manage the overwhelming data volumes that emerge as your databases, application scope, and user demand grow
• Capability to process data in real-time
• Superior security helps protect hardware, firmware, and network components from unauthorized access and security threats

Let’s take a look at why SQL Server and HPE Superdome Flex 280 combine so well with data volumes that have outgrown your current infrastructure.

A perfect match for SQL Server

What makes large databases – say, 30+ TB – difficult to deal with? The problem is they cannot fit in system memory, and so workloads cannot access all data as quickly as when it resides entirely in-memory.

To perform efficiently, this type of workload needs an I/O subsystem with nimble capabilities to be able to swap data between storage and memory. The I/O subsystem is especially important for database workloads because data needs to be read and written at extreme speeds to achieve high performance.

The HPE Superdome Flex family features a perfectly balanced architecture that delivers massive resources – I/O, compute cores, and memory capacity – with speed and efficiency. And SQL Server is particularly adept at using the speed of Superdome Flex 280, leveraging its numerous and super-fast I/O adapters to achieve rapid data processing. Superdome Flex 280’s plentiful resources also can include up to 24 TB of shared memory and up to eight sockets in a single system.

This makes a huge difference for real workloads. In a data warehouse environment, for example, high throughput creates a big advantage. Superdome Flex 280 can be equipped with many I/O adapters and devices, enabling SQL Server to parallelize access and achieve high I/O throughput. I/O work can be spread across the entire system, making Superdome Flex 280’s architecture a perfect match for SQL Server.

World-record performance at 100 TB scale

To put all this to the test, HPE and Microsoft collaborated to conduct a TPC Benchmark H (TPC-H) test with a SQL Server 2019 database at the 100TB scale factor. 100 TB is the largest TPC-H test database size available for benchmarking.

TPC-H is a decision support benchmark: It runs a series of business information ad-hoc queries and concurrent data updates, designed to simulate the types of SQL Server workloads run by retailers, manufacturers, financial services institutes, and in many other industries.

The results were new world record benchmarks in both performance and price-performance set by Superdome Flex 280 in the non-clustered category.

If you are evaluating platforms on which to run decision support systems, you should have peace of mind that scale-up Superdome Flex 280 solutions can deliver exceptional performance even with very large SQL Server databases. To learn more, read the performance brief.  

Or, if you have complex SQL Server landscapes with many instances running on clustered servers that are hard work to manage and cost a lot in licensing and support, HPE can help you with consolidation. Read our blog on consolidation strategies.

• Visit the HPE Superdome Flex family website
• Check out the Performance Brief

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Meet Compute Experts blogger, Diana Cortes, Marketing Manager, Data Solutions

Diana has spent the past 23 years working with the technologies that power the world’s most demanding IT environments and is interested in how solutions based on those technologies impact the business. A native from Colombia, Diana holds an MBA from Georgetown University and has held a variety of regional and global roles with HPE in the US, the UK and Sweden. She is based in Stockholm, Sweden.  Connect with Diana on LinkedIn!

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[i] Deloitte 2022 Retail Industry Outlook: The pandemic creates opportunities for the great retail reset

Note: The TPC states that comparisons of TPC-H results measured against different database sizes are misleading and discourages such comparisons. All TPC-H results are grouped by database size to emphasize that only results within each group are comparable. This benchmark belongs to the 100TB group and should be compared only to other benchmarks in this group.

TPC-H results show the HPE Superdome Flex 280 with a result of 1,447,031 QphH @ 100TB and $2,186.10 USD per kQphH@30TB with system availability of March 21, 2021. See tpc.org/3382

Results as of April 20, 2022.

TPC and TPC-H are trademarks of the Transaction Processing Performance Council.