Proposed SQL Server 2005 Quote for 10/14/04 ICC Meeting:

Courtesy of Chris Hughes...

Overview:

We are currently looking at a Poweredge 2850 with 16GB of RAM running 64 bit Windows and 64 but SQL 2005. This may need to be adjusted depending upon the number of applications besides SQL that have to be installed on the server that may not be 100% fully compatible with 64 bit windows.

The drive setup will be:

• 2 x 74GB 15k RPM System Drives in RAID 1
• 4 x 147GB 15k RPM Transaction Logs Drives in Raid 10
• 14 x 147 GB 15k RPM Data drives in RAID 10
• 14 x 300GB 10k ROM Backup Drives in RAID 5 - optional

This will provide ~1TB of highly speed available data storage. It will also provide 300 GB of high speed highly available transaction log space.

Features:

There are a number of features included in Enterprise Edition that may have some benefit, however the cost of enterprise edition is an additional ~$20,000 for a dual processor server. This will need to be a decision made by the administration based on feedback provided to the IFAS Acting Director of IT.

The following features are only available using SQL 2005 Enterprise Edition:

• Partitioning - Support for large-scale databases
• Parallel Index Operations - Parallel processing of indexing operations
• Indexed Views - Indexed view creation is supported in all editions. Indexed view matching by the query processor is only supported in Enterprise Edition
• Online Indexing
• Online Restore
• Fast Recovery - Database available when undo operations begin
• Integration Services Advanced Transforms - Includes data mining, text mining, and data cleansing
• Oracle Replication - Transactional replication with an Oracle database as a publisher
• Scale Out Report Servers
• Data Driven Subscriptions
• Infinite Clickthrough
• Advanced Business Analytics - Account Intelligence , Metadata Translation, Perspective and Semi-additive measures
• Proactive Caching - Provides automated caching for greater scalability and performance
• Advanced data management - Partitioned cubes, parallel processing, server synchronization
• Full writeback support - Dimension and cell writeback
• Advanced Performance Tuning - Additional options for tuning data mining models for the highest accuracy, performance, and scalability.
• SQL Server Integration Services Data Flow Integration - Perform data mining prediction and training operations directly in your operational data pipelines.
• Text Mining - Convert unstructured text data to structured data for analysis via reporting, OLAP, or data mining

Feedback Sought:

If you are using these features or would like to, please let me know in what case you plan to use them wit as many details as possible

Another item of consideration is if we include an on server backup drive, to do SQL backups to disk with retention. This option would cost approximately $10,000 for data storage. It is the opinion of the ITSA staff that this is an unneeded service and that Veritas can provide the same or higher quality of backup. Backup would be provided over the wire to the new 136T Tape Library with 4 week retention and archival backups.

Please let your opinions on this matter be known so we can ensure that nothing is overlooked when this server is quoted and that this server will meet all of the IFAS database server needs.

If you have any questions or comments, please let Chris know.