Dell PowerEdge R510 - Manual (Page 5)

Dell R510 Reference Configuration for Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 R2 Fast Track Data Warehouse
Page 3
Introduction
Data Warehousing is used for integrating, storing and analyzing data in order to perform trend analysis,
business intelligence reporting and various types of predictive analysis. With today’s never ending data
growth and complexity, it’s becoming a tedious job for customers to balance capacity and performance
within the data warehouse system. Growing data volumes and loading challenges, OLAP query
complexity, and number of users are causing response times to increase. IT executives are looking for
solutions that offer lower cost, easier management, and better performance.
There are many challenges in designing a database configuration for OLAP workloads. One is ensuring
an optimal balance of I/O, storage, memory and processing power.
Dell™ and Microsoft® jointly developed guidelines and design principles to assist customers in designing
and implementing a balanced configuration specifically for Microsoft SQL Server® data warehouse
workloads to achieve “out-of-box” scalable performance.
Another challenge is data integration and cleansing, especially where data is coming from multiple
sources. Based on direct input from customers, Dell has incorporated Dell Boomi, an efficient cloud-
based on-demand application and data integration service as part of the balanced infrastructure.
This whitepaper describes the architecture design principles needed to achieve a balanced
configuration for the Dell PowerEdge™ R510 server using the Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0
guidelines.
Audience and Scope
This whitepaper is intended for customers, partners, solution architects, database administrators,
storage administrators, and business intelligence users who are evaluating, planning, and deploying an
optimally balanced data warehouse solution. The scope of this whitepaper is limited to the data
warehouse. Analytics tools and reporting services that use the data warehouse are outside the scope of
this whitepaper.
Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse
In order to overcome the limitations of traditional data warehouse systems, Microsoft has come up with
a cost effective solution that optimally balances the hardware and software capabilities of the system.
It provides an easy to deploy data warehouse infrastructure by mainly focusing on storage tuning and
database layout. Fast Track Data Warehouse (FTDW) its implementing data warehouse solutions
differently. As most data warehousing queries scan large volumes of data, FTDW designs are optimized
for sequential scans/reads. These proven methodologies yield performance much better than that of
traditional data warehousing systems. Based on this fact, DELL has made a deep study on the FTDW
architecture and come up with a reference guide that helps customers implement FTDW on DELL
hardware.