Introduction
In the previous blogs (Part 1 and Part 2) we discussed the challenges faced by IT organizations to maintain service level agreements (SLAs) in order to deliver superior performance for their SQL Server environment. In this blog, we will focus on the high availability aspect of managing SQL Server.
Current High Availability Challenges
For high availability, the majority of organizations use Microsoft SQL Server Standard* with Microsoft Failover Cluster. Unfortunately, this solution addresses the server downtime, but not storage outages (figure 1.) Some solve this problem by upgrading to Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise, but that is outside the reach of most organizations as it breaks the budget requirements. So they look for alternative solutions, such as disk replication or 3rd party host replication. Both solutions offer some safeguards – but doesn’t guarantee against storage downtime or data loss. IT organizations need a comprehensive solution that can not only protect them against natural disasters or site failures, but also protect them against storage or datacenter failures.
Figure 1
Current Solution
The challenges associated with meeting SQL Server performance and uptime objectives under tight budget constraints requirements has left IT organizations to either meet SLAs on only select few SQL Server instances, which adds to the complexity, or has them bear the pain of not meeting SLAs at all.
Ideal Solution
Although SQL Server administrators utilize Microsoft cluster for high availability, it alone cannot guarantee storage uptime. High availability for storage is arguably more critical than server availability as 1 in 5 storage failures result in unforeseen outages for entire clusters of servers. DataCore SDS and Virtual SAN enable continuous storage availability, facilitate faster testing of applications and enable more SQL server instances to benefit from uninterrupted access. The combination of DataCore with Microsoft Failover Cluster enables organizations to ensure high-availability for both server and storage across all critical SQL server instances.
With DataCore, organizations can synchronously mirror data between tiers of storage to prevent planned and unplanned storage downtime with zero impact to SQL Server performance. Support for stretch and metro-clusters provide further fault isolation. For additional safeguards against regional disasters, remote asynchronous replication is also available.
Summary
DataCore™ Software-defined Storage (SDS) solution empowers IT organizations to cost-efficiently accelerate SQL Server performance and attain high levels of availability. DataCore SDS extends the value of existing storage resources and enables rapid technology adoption, all under comprehensive, infrastructure-wide storage services.
*SQL Server Standard 2014
