White Papers

5 BP1062 | Best Practices for Decision Support Systems with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 using Dell EqualLogic PS Series
Storage Arrays
Acknowledgements
This best practice white paper was produced by the following members of the Dell Storage team:
Engineering: Lakshmi Devi Subramanian
Technical Marketing: Magi Kapoor
Editing: Camille Daily
Additional contributors: Ananda Sankaran, Darren Miller, Mike Kosacek, and Rob Young
Feedback
We encourage readers of this publication to provide feedback on the quality and usefulness of this
information by sending an email to [e-mail].
Executive summary
Data warehouse (DW) or decision support system (DSS) applications present organizations with unique
opportunities for leveraging their data to support, grow and expand their business, and facilitate strategic
planning. Companies are capturing, storing, and analyzing large amounts of data every day. As data is
continuing to grow with increasing complexity, it is becoming more and more challenging for
organizations to balance cost, capacity, and performance of these warehousing systems. Therefore, it is
essential to configure a balanced end-to-end system to enable consistent performance without any
bottlenecks during DW loading, query and maintenance processing. Simply adding more hardware
resources at growing data is not only costly, but also highly inefficient. Properly designing and sizing the
DW infrastructure for performance and capacity, and regularly monitoring resource utilization, can prevent
bottlenecks and deliver a cost-effective solution.
This paper describes sizing and best practices for deploying a data warehouse on Microsoft
®
SQL Server
®
2012 using Dell™ EqualLogic™ storage arrays and demonstrates that:
• EqualLogic PS Series arrays are capable of sustaining high levels of I/O performance for SQL
Server 2012 DSS workloads.
• Columnstore Index can significantly improve the data warehouse query execution times.
• Adding EqualLogic PS Series arrays can scale capacity as well as I/O performance.
[e-mail]