September 2, 2009 at 8:46 pm
My manager approached me late today and told me that we have roughly 200 k in our budget for hardware and software licenses and upgrades for this year. He was looking for ideas on how to spend it. Whoo Hooo!
I've been brought on board at this company to design, from the ground up, a SQL Server data mart that will be used by our Analytics team. The data is all sourced in Teradata and I'll be using SSIS to pull it down and load the SQL database. The server itself is fairly robust ( I don't have all the specs in front of me but I think it has quad dual-core processors and 16 GB of RAM and 3 TB of SAN space). I am building the environment out in SQL Server 2005 and using SSAS and SSRS to provide the data to the analysts. I have a separate ETL server which hosts my SSIS instance and is used for scheduling and running all of our automated SSIS jobs. Our SSRS/web server is also on a separate box.
We are so much at the beginning of the process of building out this environment, I'm having a hard time thinking what else we could possibly need. I'd like to upgrade to SQL Server 2008, but we may not be able to yet because of corporate standards. We may add another 3 TB of disk space for roughly 40 k, and I'd like to beef up my ETL box a bit.
My question is, what would you do? Given the purpose and intent of this environment, what tools, hardware, or software would you like to have to do the job? What else should we consider for report rendering and delivery, or forecasting, or anything else that I just don't know about?
September 3, 2009 at 8:46 am
September 3, 2009 at 8:56 am
more RAM?
or maybe some Fusion SSDs for speed?
As far as tools, sorry, not sure what might help you here.
September 3, 2009 at 9:19 am
I don't want to ask a dumb question Steve, but Fusion SSDs? Can you elaborate a bit on this, have you put this to use anywhere? What kind of benefits did you see?
September 3, 2009 at 9:25 am
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/sqlmanofmystery/archive/2009/04/14/ssd-the-game-changer.aspx
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/sqlmanofmystery/archive/2009/08/02/fusion-io-update.aspx
http://www.dvnation.com/Fusion-IO-IODrive-SSD-Solid-State-Disk-Drive-Review.html
I heard from another MVP that they had a customer which had run them for over 8 months and loved them. No real issues, and tremendous speed improvements. They couldn't disclose the customer because of an NDA.
September 3, 2009 at 10:33 am
Thanks for the info. I've read through them and it sounds very interested. We'll consider this.
Anyone else??
September 3, 2009 at 12:38 pm
just an idea...and no doubt already in place, buts how's your Disaster Recovery model looking?
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September 3, 2009 at 1:21 pm
gah (9/3/2009)
just an idea...and no doubt already in place, buts how's your Disaster Recovery model looking?
Our corporate support team plans the DR strategies for our servers. We will be taking regular SQL backps our our data and the server team will be responsible for file system backups on the SAN (with will backup our bacup files). Most of the data itself will be sourced from our Teradata system so we could revert to that as a data source if needed.
September 7, 2009 at 3:55 pm
John Rowan (9/2/2009)
My manager approached me late today and told me that we have roughly 200 k in our budget for hardware and software licenses and upgrades for this year. He was looking for ideas on how to spend it. Whoo Hooo!
Perfect!
Just hire two or three of us, we will come out with a comprehensive, detailed plan for your company. Our bill will be roughly about $200k 😀
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Pablo (Paul) Berzukov
Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.
Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.September 7, 2009 at 5:17 pm
As a wish list - I would ask for two systems (clustered) running Windows Server 2008 x64 - 64GB RAM and 4 hex core processors to host SQL Server 2005/2008.
I would also bump up to Enterprise Edition - if you are not already, there are quite a few features in the enterprise version that you will need for a data mart/warehouse environment.
You could use both nodes - one as your SSIS node, the other for the the database and SSAS (if you are using that). However, that would mean additional licensing costs 😉
With that kind of system - you could run everything on a single node, but you would only do that during maintenance cycles and/or emergency situations. During normal business, you would have quite a bit of resources to process the data and perform your extracts and loads.
That's what I would be asking for...
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February 25, 2010 at 4:16 pm
How did your project end up? I will be interested to know. Thanks.
March 1, 2010 at 11:25 am
I ended up purchasing an additional 2 TB of disk space for our SAN. In fact, the SAN that we were using was almost full so I had to buy a new SAN to hold the new disk space. I also purchased a new server for our ETL box. Our original box was an older Compaq DL360 G4P with 4X Intel Xeon 3.4 GHz CPUs and 4 GB of RAM.
We're still using the original box, but it will finally be replaced here this month. We're replacing it with a DL360 G6 with 32 GB of RAM. I'm not sure about the CPUs, but the server is going to be a much better box for our ETL.
Well, that's it. Nothing too exciting, but this is what we used our budget for.
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