SQL Server 2012 Has Arrived

Today Microsoft released SQL Server 2012 to Manufacturers. SQL "Denali" as it was known in its code name has several new features including improved availability through its Always On technology, new business intelligence tools and cloud ready technologies. Want to learn more? Join Microsoft's free SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch on March 7^th, 2012 to attend keynote presentations, attend tracks around Mission Critical Confidence, Breakthrough Insights or Cloud on your Terms and visit exhibitor booths such as EMC's – all from the comfort of your office or home.

So what exactly does EMC have to do with all of this? A lot. EMC has been a major partner with the SQL Server team for many years. Through our integration and support, EMC helps to provide additional performance, extend availability, provide advance data protection, accelerate virtualization and provide services to help with deployments and migrations. For example, EMC support SQL Server through:

• Improved performance using EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) technologies. Using EMC's VFCache, test showed that EMC was able to reduce latency by 50% while improving throughput. With FAST Virtual Provisioning, tests have shown up to 40% higher performance at a lower cost of storage and with FAST Cache (extending storage array cache with Flash), testing proved a 300% performance improvement in SQL transactions.

• Data protection technologies such as Data Domain and Avamar provide up to 50% performance improvements compared to traditional solutions while technology like EMC Replication Manager provides snapshot copies of SQL Server databases for Read Only application consistent copies for test and development purposes to assist with testing new application code or running reports from a non-production copy of the data.

• Multisite failover clustering provides instance-level high availability and disaster recovery as one of the architecture choices under SQL Server AlwaysOn. EMC continues to support local failover clustering configurations on its storage solutions, as well as multi-site and multi-subnet clusters with EMC Cluster Enabler extension which expands the range of cluster storage and management capabilities across long distances. EMC replication technologies like RecoverPoint make use of consistency groups, which let users ensures that data at any point in time will be replicated together and fully consistent, a huge benefit when protecting a federated environment of multiple SQL databases, instances or even servers with various file systems dependent on a SQL database such as Microsoft SharePoint.

• EMC is a leading partner in the Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse program since its introduction. EMC has created, tested and validated high-performance SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse configurations approved by Microsoft. Using these Fast Track architectures, EMC helps accelerate the planning and deployment of data warehouse configurations using best practices and documented guidance.

• EMC's Storage Integrator (ESI) is a free easy to use tool for creating new disks in a physical or virtual Windows environment. Using wizards, administrators can view Hyper-V to EMC storage relationships while creating new disks and even configuring new SQL Server databases.

• EMC Consulting provides a full offering of SQL Server and database services to help customers migrate or deploy a SQL Server infrastructure. Services include Consulting Services for Microsoft SQL Server, Upgrade and Migration for Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle to SQL Server migration services, Business Intelligence for Infrastructure and many more.

Interested to learn more? Be sure to visit the EMC for SQL Server 2012 Launch Page, visit the EMC SQL Server Solutions page for documentation and presentations on previous versions of SQL Server or finally, visit the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community for more information around Microsoft products as well as EMC resources, discussions, demos and data!

Comments

[Aspiringgeek]

Greetings, what was the workload you used for these tests? Thanks much.