FlashStack Converged Infrastructure for Microsoft SQL Server

Uninterrupted database performance with AlwaysOn Availability Groups and native FlashArray-based replication

Microsoft SQL Server is an increasingly vital database workload for many businesses, both small and large. — It’s easily one of the most widely deployed database platforms in the world. Unlike other, more monolithic database architectures, SQL Server lends itself to a multi-instance deployment with some organizations running ten or more simultaneous instances. Even a hundred or more instances are not uncommon. With SQL Server such a business-critical application performance, availability and reliability are key requirements for any size deployment.

At Pure Storage we’ve done comprehensive testing of SQL Server on our FlashStack Converged Infrastructure (CI) architecture – Cisco, Pure Storage, and VMware infrastructure provides a fantastic level of performance, reliability, protection, and scalability to mission critical SQL Server deployments. On FlashStack CI we’ve built out a comprehensive solution for highly-available Microsoft SQL Server that includes:

  1. End-to-End scalability with Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)
  2. Virtualization infrastructure with VMware vSphere 6.0
  3. Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Failover Clusters
  4. Microsoft SQL Server 2014 AlwaysOn Availability Groups

By using these core technologies, and leveraging the ability to rapidly-seed Replicas using the intelligence of the Pure Storage FlashArray, SQL Server is not only protected but remains online and performant. The Pure Storage FlashArray also provides additional benefits through native replication and snapshot capabilities, known as FlashRecover. Helping protect active instances, the FlashRecover replication can also replicate vital data to disaster recovery sites or for use in your development environments.

Rather than post all the technical details here, I suggest you read through our paper detailing our testing work – it will really help you understand how to configure these powerful tools and get the most out of them by using FlashArray as your storage infrastructure!

If you’re interested in learning more, stop by the Pure Storage booth #108 at Microsoft Ignite 2015 in Chicago. We’re booth #108 and we will have a live, functional FlashStack running Microsoft SQL Server with Cisco UCS for you to see.

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