ESG Lab Report Integrated Platforms for Breakthrough Insights The HP and Microsoft Data Management Portfolio By Brian Garrett, Vice President, ESG Lab May 2013
Lab Validation: HP and Microsoft Data Management Portfolio 2 Contents Introduction... 3 Microsoft SQL Server 2012... 4 HP and Microsoft Data Management Solutions Portfolio... 4 ESG Lab Validation... 5 Ease of Deployment... 5 Ease of Management... 6 Performance and Scalability... 7 Issues to Consider... 8 The Bigger Truth... 9 ESG Lab Reports The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about data center technology products for companies of all types and sizes. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable feature/functions of products, show how they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement. ESG Lab's expert third-party perspective is based on our own hands-on testing as well as on interviews with customers who use these products in production environments. This ESG Lab report was sponsored by Hewlett Packard. All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.
Lab Validation: HP and Microsoft Data Management Portfolio 3 Introduction This report examines the HP and Microsoft Data Management Portfolio with a focus on the value of HP Converged Infrastructure as a foundation for a Microsoft SQL Server solution designed to ultimately simplify the delivery of real-time access and information insights for transaction processing and data warehousing workloads. ESG defines big data as addressing a situation organizations face when their existing data management solutions, including the related infrastructure, struggle to effectively support the analytic requirements of the business. This struggle typically occurs because the data volume and complexity can no longer be processed, integrated, or analyzed in the desired business timeframe. Big data represents not only the challenge, but also the solution of delivering better business insights more quickly. Though IT professionals pride themselves on building data management solutions from the floor up piecing together disparate components designed and manufactured in isolation the process is rapidly changing. When it comes to purchasing infrastructure for data management and virtual computing environments, the do-it-yourself (DIY) model is becoming a thing of the past. Instead, the new IT consumption model is moving toward reference architectures and preconfigured solutions which ESG refers to as integrated computing platforms. Sometimes referred to as converged or private cloud infrastructures, integrated computing platforms offer an appealing alternative to traditional infrastructure deployments wherein organizations purchase and deploy infrastructure on a component-by-component basis. ESG research indicates that the benefits that are driving the adoption of integrated platforms include simplified management, faster deployment, and reduced costs (see Figure 1). 1 Figure 1. Benefits of an Integrated Platform What benefits do you believe an integrated computing platform offers your organization? (Percent of respondents, N=471, multiple responses accepted) Ease of management 44% Faster deployment time Improved total cost of ownership (TCO) Less time and resources required for hardware 33% 35% 37% Reduction in interoperability issues Improved application performance Improved service and support 28% 28% 28% It is more straightforward to purchase from one Less training required 17% 19% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2013. HP and Microsoft have embraced this new consumption model with a data management portfolio integrated across HP hardware, services, support, and management software along with Microsoft SQL Server 2012. 1 Source: ESG Research Brief, Integrated Computing Trends, March 2011.
Lab Validation: HP and Microsoft Data Management Portfolio 4 Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Microsoft SQL Server 2012 is a relational model database server that s used to develop and deploy database applications, improve IT and developer efficiency, and deliver highly scalable and manageable business intelligence services. New tools and enhancements in SQL Server 2012 provide innovative breakthroughs that can be leveraged throughout the organization. With new, cloud-ready technologies, customers remain agile and future-proof for application symmetry across servers, private clouds, and public clouds. New features include: Column Store Index, which enables astonishingly fast speeds for common data warehouse queries. AlwaysOn, which provides high availability and advanced disaster recovery. Power View/PowerPivot, which speeds data discovery with Excel-like functionality and familiarity. BI Semantic Model, which provides multiple ways of building business intelligence (BI) solutions. HP and Microsoft Data Management Solutions Portfolio Building upon more than 30 years of collaboration, HP and Microsoft have created a powerful portfolio of data management solutions that are designed to meet the challenges associated with each of the phases of the data management lifecycle from the performance and scalability of enterprise-class online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads to the cost and complexity associated with delivering analytic insight for data warehousing workflows that move at the speed of the business. The portfolio addresses scale-out and scale-up data management requirements with reference architectures and fully integrated appliances and services. Regardless of the form factor, each is designed with a goal of providing a best-of-breed data management solution that s purpose built to meet customers workloads requirements. Each of the solutions in the portfolio is designed with a goal of reducing cost and complexity and optimizing the agility of the business with a quick and easy deployment model. Building on HP s heritage of providing an innovative hardware foundation for mission-critical database applications deployed around the globe, the key components of the HP and Microsoft data management portfolio include: HP Database Consolidation Reference Architecture is designed to meet the high I/O transaction requirements of SQL Server workloads that have been consolidated with the Hyper-V Private Cloud technology that s built into Microsoft Windows Server. The solution is managed with Microsoft Systems Center and HP Insight Control. HP Universal Database Solution for Mission-Critical x86 Reference Architecture is optimized to meet the performance and response time needs of the most demanding OLTP workloads. The solution leverages advanced features of the HP ProLiant DL980 servers, flash-based or SSD based memory arrays, and the advanced high availability and disaster tolerance capabilities of SQL Server 2012. SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse Reference Architecture combines Microsoft software, consolidated guidance, and validated configurations with HP technology, including compute, network, storage, and value-added software to create a turnkey platform for on-premises SQL Server implementations. HP AppSystem for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse is the next generation of data warehouse solutions. This factory-built appliance is preloaded with Microsoft software, integrated, tested, and tuned to meet the demanding performance requirements of data warehouse and big data analytic workloads. It features close integration with Excel, Power View, Power Pivot, and other Microsoft OLAP/BI tools as well as the use of standard SQL queries (instead of MapReduce) to access and join Hadoop data with relational data. Tedious maintenance tasks are streamlined with the HP Support Pack Utility Suite of tools to simplify processes and reduce costs. Validation, diagnostics, and updates for all of the hardware and software components are completed with a single mouse click. HP Business Decision Reference Architecture provides a flexible blueprint for building out a low-cost, efficient Self Service Business Intelligence (BI) Platform using ProLiant Gen8 Servers along with Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and SQL Server 2012. The Business Decision RA has been fully tested and validated, providing all that s needed to for users to quickly gain information insight and make intelligent business decisions faster.
Lab Validation: HP and Microsoft Data Management Portfolio 5 ESG Lab Validation This section presents highlights of independent, hands-on testing and analysis of the HP and Microsoft Data Management portfolio with a focus on ease of deployment, ease of management, and cost-effective performance and scalability. Ease of Deployment ESG Lab tested a solution that leverages the HP Database Consolidation Reference Architecture with a goal of consolidating up to 320 SQL Server instances in a half rack HP Converged Infrastructure. The integrated hardware and software offering provided a simple, scalable database consolidation solution that delivered compute, storage, and network resources in a single rack. ESG Lab confirmed that a fully integrated HP Data Management solution can be used to reduce deployment time from months to days. Thirty minutes after getting started with an HP field-checked appliance, the first SQL Server instance was up and running. Figure 2. Database Consolidation with HP and Microsoft Why This Matters ESG research indicates that return on investment, reduction in operational expenditures, and business process improvements are the most important considerations for justifying IT investments in 2013. With those goals in mind, a growing number of IT organizations are deploying integrated platforms with a goal of simplifying the planning, deployment, management, and support of their data management infrastructure. As a matter of fact, nearly a quarter of respondents (24%) report that they have already deployed an integrated platform and more than a third (36%) would prefer an integrated platform. 2 A fully integrated platform saves time and money as it increases the return on investment and helps IT respond quicker to the needs of the business. 2 Source: ESG Research Brief, Virtualized Computing Infrastructure Preferences, April 2012.
Lab Validation: HP and Microsoft Data Management Portfolio 6 Ease of Management ESG Lab has experienced the ease of management of the HP and Microsoft Data Management portfolio during hands-on testing of a number of solutions the portfolio. An example is shown in the System Center Operations Manager screenshot in Figure 3. In this example, Operations Manager is being used to manage virtualized applications and the topology of the hardware those applications are running on. Deep integration with HP Insight Manager and Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track best practices simplifies management and makes it easy to troubleshoot problems down to the hardware level. Figure 3. HP Integration with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager Why This Matters Management complexity continues to grow as applications proliferate within organizations. IT managers are being asked to address the situation with limited IT budgets while continuing to support high service levels. A pressing need for better management capabilities, including tightly integrated management tools for both physical and virtual SQL Server instances, has never been more apparent. ESG Lab has confirmed that deep management integration between HP and Microsoft simplifies management as it makes it easy to troubleshoot problems with SQL Server applications down to the hardware level. The HP Support Pack Utility Suite, which ESG Lab looks forward to testing later in 2013, further simplifies management with an innovative set of tools that significantly simplifies updates and other maintenance tasks.
SQL Batch Requests/sec Lab Validation: HP and Microsoft Data Management Portfolio 7 Performance and Scalability ESG Lab tested the improved performance and scalability of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 running on a powerful HP DL980 server with 64 Intel processor cores and 512GB of RAM. Performance testing emulated the interactive online database activity as thousands of simulated online brokerage customers generated trades, performed account inquiries, and did market research. The sum of the number of transactions processed per second and the average response time for ten transaction types were monitored as the number of virtual CPUs within a single virtual machine was scaled from four to 64 the recently improved upper limit for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012. As shown in Figure 4, SQL Server batch requests increased from 225 to 2,870 as the number of vcpus running on a single virtual machine increased from four to 64. To put this into perspective, Microsoft documentation indicates that over 1,000 batch requests per second indicate a very busy SQL Server. 3 Of course, this is a relative number that depends on the power of the hardware used to deploy SQL Server applications. In this case, the efficiency of Hyper-V and SQL Server 2012 Hyper-V running on a powerful multi-core HP DL980 server provided more than enough horsepower to support a very busy SQL Server. Figure 4. HP DL980 and SQL Server 2012 Batch Request Scalability 3,000 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 Why This Matters 0 SQL Batch Request Scalability (HP DL980, SQL Server 2012, Single Hyper-V VM, 64GB of RAM) 3,500 4 8 16 32 64 Number of virtual CPUs Data growth in corporate data centers shows no signs of abating. As data accumulates, there is a corresponding burden on IT to maintain acceptable levels of performance, whether that is measured by the speed with which an application responds, the ability to aggregate and deliver data, or the ultimate business value of that information. As a matter of fact, more than half of respondents to a recent ESG survey of enterprise-class IT professionals identified improving data analytics as one of their organizations top five overall IT priorities over the next 12-18 months and 28% report that they are unable to complete analytics in a reasonable amount of time. 4 ESG Lab has confirmed that the improved performance and scalability of the HP and Microsoft Data Management Portfolio meets the demanding performance requirements of a wide range of database applications from the response time sensitive requirements of virtualized tier-1 transactional workloads to the throughput intensive requirements of a parallel data warehouse. 3 http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=64044 4 Source: ESG Research Report, The Impact of Big Data on Data Analytics, September 2011.
Lab Validation: HP and Microsoft Data Management Portfolio 8 Issues to Consider Choosing the best infrastructure for enterprise database deployment involves considerations beyond meeting initial requirements for suitable performance and capacity. Enterprise databases typically have long lifecycles, so they tend to grow, perhaps shrink, and are caught up in multiple development, test, and upgrade cycles over their lifespan. Some of those longer-term, and perhaps more strategic, considerations include: Reduction in operational costs: An infrastructure designed to scale with the database throughout its lifecycle reduces the impact, and associated cost, on DBAs and IT infrastructure personnel in terms of monitoring, tuning, and adjustment. Leveraging expertise: By using well-understood operating environments, customers diminish the requirement for new or additional training. Single sourcing risk mitigation: Customers that mainly depend on a single source for the infrastructure and related services reduce the number of points of risk over time; in essence, both parties have considerable skin in the game and work as partners. Utility-class database applications are a great place to start with the consolidation of SQL Server instances deployed within virtual machines on HP hardware. These applications have modest performance and availability requirements and are often deployed with third-party software applications or developed within departments of an organization. High rates of consolidation and savings can be achieved by consolidating this class of SQL Server application workloads onto a fewer number of servers. Capacity planning and performance analysis of existing SQL Server applications is recommended not only to determine if a SQL Server workload is suitable for virtualization, but also to plan the amount of processor, memory, and network resources that need to be configured within each virtual machine. While not tested by ESG Lab, the In-Memory Column Store feature that was introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 uses a new query execution paradigm called batch processing, which increases common data warehouse queries significantly. Customers have experienced up to 100x performance improvements in star join and similar queries.
Lab Validation: HP and Microsoft Data Management Portfolio 9 The Bigger Truth Whether measured by increased revenues, market share gains, reduced costs, or scientific breakthroughs, databases and data management solutions have always played a key role in the ability to harness value from electronically stored information. What has changed recently is that as more business processes have become automated, IT managers are struggling to keep up with the velocity, volume, and variety of data that s being created, processed, and analyzed. Consequently, business executives are demanding more from their data management infrastructure with a goal of obtaining faster and more impactful insight. As a matter of fact, a recent ESG survey indicated that improving data analytics for real-time business intelligence and customer insight is one of the top five business initiatives that will impact IT spending decisions over the next 12-18 months. 5 Recognizing the opportunities and challenges associated with a perpetual rush of new data, HP and Microsoft have been delivering powerful data management solutions for decades. Customers around the globe have deployed business critical SQL Server applications on the HP Converged Infrastructure hardware platform. Many are running on a legacy HP hardware infrastructure powered by SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008. Why should those organizations consider upgrading to SQL Server 2012? Why should they consider the latest HP hardware as part of an engineered and integrated solution? The answer is simple: Purchase, deployment, and management are simplified, optimized, and accelerated with an integrated solution that s fully supported by HP. SQL Server 2012 applications deployed on the latest converged infrastructure from HP improves the manageability, performance, scalability, and availability of traditional online transaction processing workloads and provides a performance boost of 100X or more for big data analytic and data warehouse workloads. With the hypervisor support that s built into Windows Server 2012 at no additional charge and the multi-hypervisor support that s built into Microsoft System Center, organizations can lower costs and benefit from existing skill sets using tools with which their staff is already familiar. With the recently introduced HP Support Pack Utility Suite, single-click diagnostics and upgrades save time and money wasted on tedious yet necessary tasks, while ensuring that your fully integrated SQL Server platform is configured correctly and running optimally. ESG believes organizations of all shapes and sizes should invest in improving their self-understanding and the understanding of their customers and markets through data management, business intelligence, and analytics. Unlike ten or even five years ago, the technology exists today for nearly every organization to more effectively use data as an essential tool, both tactically and strategically. While many IT managers think that the benefits of big data and next-generation analytics platforms (e.g., Hadoop) are currently out of reach for their organizations, ESG believes that most would be surprised by the breadth, depth, and big data analytic capabilities of HP and Microsoft. 5 Source: ESG Research Report, 2013 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2013.
20 Asylum Street Milford, MA 01757 Tel: 508.482.0188 Fax: 508.482.0218 www.esg-global.com HP Publication: 4AA4-6481ENW