Organizations of all sizes depend on access to their business- and mission-critical structured data more than ever before. As the fastest growing relational database application, Microsoft SQL Server is relied upon for a huge variety of applications including web site hosting, customer relationship management, financial systems, and business operations data warehousing and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Sharepoint Server. These growing SQL databases must be high performing, robust, highly available, and protected. Consolidating SQL data onto a virtualized Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN achieves these requirements while simplifying storage management and reducing costs.

Accelerate All Aspects of Leveraging Business Data

Faster daily operations for SQL Database Administrators
The intelligent Dell EqualLogic iSCSI arrays are optimized for SQL Server and other Microsoft applications right out of the box. Storage virtualization and automatic load balancing of OLTP databases eases overall SQL management, while built-in redundancy, hot swap service, snapshots, and auto-replication eliminate downtime.

Optimized performance for transactional data
With the EqualLogic line, Dell offers the highest database I/O performance among mission critical storage solutions as validated by independent tests. Optimal performance is automatic out of the box – SAN storage continuously self-optimizes as data changes and storage is expanded.

Non-disruptive database expansion
As your SQL Server deployment grows, PS Series arrays harness their aggregate resources to evenly load balance data requests, additional capacity, network activity, and cache. When SQL volumes and logs grow, PS Series volumes grow online. In addition to instant volume expansion, more physical storage can be non-disruptively added to your SAN, increasing capacity and performance with online load balancing. With advanced EqualLogic thin provisioning, SQL Server database volumes can be preset to a specific size at volume creation. Physical storage is then automatically allocated from the free storage pool as the database grows in size. The benefits are simpler management of SQL volumes, more efficient use of physical storage resources, and the realization of seamless “buy as you grow” storage purchasing.

SQL database Smart Copy with Auto-Snapshot Manager
The easy-to-use Auto-Snapshot Manager brings Smart Copy capability to SQL Server applications. Within an intuitive, simple to use, GUI, administrators can easily make rapid, host-integrated snapshots, clones, and replicas of complete storage recovery groups. In the event that a database needs to be retrieved from a snapshot, clone or replica, EqualLogic Auto-Snapshot Manager provides fast restore capabilities. Collectively these all-inclusive features enhance a database administrator’s ability to protect their databases and ensure that the applications are available to their users.

SQL backup and disaster recovery
Auto-replication, a standard PS Series feature, enables SQL databases and SAN boot disks to be replicated to remote sites over standard IP WAN network for disaster protection and recovery. Through the integration and support of Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), the Dell EqualLogic SAN family is fully certified and compatible with leading backup and disaster recovery solutions including applications from Asigra, CommVault Systems, Computer Associates, EMC/Legato, FilesX, Microsoft (including DPM), Mimosa, Spectra Logic, Sonasoft, Symantec, and TimeSpring.

Customized service levels for individual databases
EqualLogic tiering and pooling capabilities enable automatic or customized tiering of SQL databases and logs. This enables SQL DBAs to assign different storage tiers to offer varying levels of storage performance to sets of databases. If service level requirements change, DBAs can easily move SQL volumes, as well as other application data, to the appropriate service tier without downtime or disruption.