What’s happening in 2011

2010 came by pretty quickly. It has been a very busy year with all kinds of expansions, migrations and consolidations. We installed HP Blade Servers, VMware, SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2, CentOS 4.2 X64, F5s, Dell R710s/610s, Dell Equallogic Storage, TFS 2010, Windows 7 X64 for all DBAs and BI developers, etc. The list continues.

So what is happening next year? Many exiting things, with a core focus on HA, DR, Analytics, SharePoint 2010, and VMware on production databases.

On the Database side:

  • Homogenous environment. All instance running under SQL Server 2008 R2 (some edition downgrades in the mix)
  • Isolated Development, QA and UAT environments with proper edition (Developer, Standard, Enterprise). VMWare and MSDN come to play.
  • Management Data Warehouse deployment to collect health information from all production instances. Birds-eye view of all instances in one location.
  • Central Management Servers Implementation
  • Policy Based Management Implementation
  • Data-Tier Application Implementation
  • RML utilities for pre-production load testing
  • PowerShell

On the Analytics side:

  • All legacy cubes migrated to SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 R2
  • Deployment of Star Schemas for the remaining business units
  • Dedicated instance for transformations (SSIS)
  • Fire up 3rd and 4th VM for our Scaled-out Deployment of Reporting Services
  • Mastering DAX. PowerPivot for Excel 2010
  • GUI implementation for browsing our cubes. We are in the process of evaluating products.

High Availability & Disaster Recovery:

  • All instances to be moved to HA (2, 3, 4 node clusters). No more single point of failures.
  • Zero-Downtime database migration with Mirroring
  • Block Level Backup and restore offsite
  • Full-Log-Daily Differential Backups across the board.
  • Backup file test by restoring to our UAT environments

Storage:

  • Footprint Reduction by archiving historical data that can be rolled up
  • Storage Expansion to benefit from the spindle count
  • SSD for the most demanding applications (over iSCSI)

Training:

  • I am encouraging my team members to use twitter, to follow knowledgeable folks and read tweets from the #sqlserver and #sqlhelp hash tags.
  • To Read Blog Posts and subscribe to RSS feeds
  • To attend to SQL Saturdays
  • To buy books (and e-books)
  • To get trained online and if necessary bring someone to get us trained.
  • To attend the SQL Rally 2011 or SQL Pass Summit 2011
  • To read about SQL Server Denali and install on a VM to test.

I see 2011 being an excellent year for us.

Happy Holidays everyone.

2011

SQL Server 2008 R2 and Nehalem Processors

I want to share a note about our latest experiences with SQL Server 2008 R2 EE X64 and Nehalem Processors. We have an active/active SQL Server cluster solution running on Two Dell R710 machines and Equallogic Storage Solution using iSCSI. Each Server has Two Intel X5550 processors, 64 GB of RAM and is running under Windows Server 2008 R2 EE X64.

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