Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 2000 Reference Architecture
Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 2000 THIS DESIGN GUIDE IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. © 2012 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this material in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Dell Inc. is strictly forbidden. For more information, contact Dell.
Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 2000 Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................ 2 Audience ............................................................................................................. 2 Reference Architecture ............................................................................................... 2 Hardware Component Architecture ..........................................................
Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 2000 Introduction Data warehouses store large amounts of data accumulated from a wide range of sources. This data is generally used for trend analysis, business intelligence reporting, and various types of predictive analysis. Because data continuously grows in both volume and complexity, organizations often struggle to balance data warehouse capacity and performance.
Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 2000 Internal Hard Drives Internal Storage Controller Operating System • • (24) 900GB 10K 2.5” SAS (18 Data, 2 Logs, 2 Stage, 2 Hot Spares) (2) 900GB 10K 2.
Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 2000 Figure 1: Memory Slot Locations See the Fast Track Reference Guide for detailed recommendations on system memory configurations. Quickstart Software In collaboration with Microsoft, Dell developed a wizard to simplify deploying the Quickstart appliance.
Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 2000 Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 • Enable Lock Pages In Memory: This policy setting is enabled to prevent the system from paging memory to disk. See Enable the Lock Pages in Memory Option (Windows) for more information. SQL Server 2012 • SQL Server Startup Options: o -E: This parameter increases the number of contiguous extends that are allocated to a database table in each file as it grows to improve sequential access.
Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 2000 Figure 2: Virtual Disk Settings Page 6
Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 2000 Figure 3: Internal Storage Controller Settings RAID Disk Group One of the most critical decisions when deploying a new storage solution is which RAID type(s) to use, as that choice heavily impacts application performance. Dell tested nine RAID 1 disk groups for database data files and one RAID 1 disk group for log files. This left four disks in the front of the chassis, two in RAID 0 to be used for staging data, and the remaining two for spare drives.
Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 2000 • Databases (User, System Temp, Log) For each internal storage array: • Nine RAID 1 disk groups were created, with each consisting of two disks. These RAID groups were dedicated for the primary user data. One RAID 1 disk group was created with two disks. This RAID group was dedicated to host database transaction log files. Two RAID 0 disks were created with one disk each. These RAID groups were created as a staging area to transfer data into the appliance.
Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 2000 Conclusion Microsoft Fast Track Reference Guidelines helped achieve an optimized database architecture on the Quickstart Appliance with balanced CPU and storage bandwidth. Table 3 shows performance metrics of the reference configuration. Table 3: Performance Metrics Category Value Description FTDW Rated Data Warehouse Capacity 12 TB This capacity rating is based on “up-to” capacity, but adjusted to account for Fast Track Rated I/O.
Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 2000 References Dell | Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Solutions http://www.dell.com/sql Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance Solutions http://www.dell.com/quickstartdw Dell Services http://www.dell.com/services Dell Support http://www.dell.com/support OLTP and OLAP http://datawarehouse4u.info/OLTP-vs-OLAP.html Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse and Configuration Guide Information http://www.microsoft.com/fasttrack http://download.microsoft.
