Yesterday was EMC World day 2 and it was another great day at the conference. I started the day a little late as I was out pretty late on Monday night at a party. I was abe to great some great sessions in during the day however.
The first session that I hit was “SQL Server on VMware – Architecting for Performance” which was a bit of a let down. The first half of the session was mostly a SQL Server consolidation 101 session, and a lot of the points the speaker talked about in solution design I didn’t agree with. Some examples include her recommendation to set max server memory at ~500 megs below the memory allocated to the VM. Personally I feel that the max server memory setting should be set about 2-4 gigs below the amount of memory allocated to the VM (depending on what other software is installed on the VM, how much SQLCLR is used, etc.). There were also recommendations to enable lock pages on all servers as well as to disable the ballon drivers which I didn’t agree with either.
The second session that I went two was “VNX Block Oriented Performance” which was a great session. During this 500 level session the speaker talked about the hardware layout of the new EMC VNX storage array, specifically exactly how much data can be pushed through each internal component of the VNX and VNXe storage arrays. I’m not going to put the numbers in this post as I want to get the deck downloaded from the EMC World website so i can double check all the numbers before I do. With all the info that the speaker was giving out there was no way I could type it all fast enough on my laptop, much less my iPad which I was using to take notes.
The third session that I went to had a crazy long title. In my notes I titled it as “Building a highly available enterprise data warehouse using a bunch of shit”. The session was all about using the EMC GreenPlum database to build a distributed data warehouse and levering some of of their other products like the VMAX, Data Domain, and SRDF replication to protect through DR and back up processes. If you don’t know what GreenPlum is, it is a very scalable data warehouse product which is based on the Progress SQL platform. The system is configured as a fully redundant system which is scaled out by adding in more x86 servers into the farm. The systems scales easily into the petabyte range and EMC says they have several customers with multiple-petabyte databases running within GreenPlum. The nice thing with GreenPlum is that it comes as a software package you can install on your own hardware but also as a preconfigured appliance as a full rack. The next version will allow you to chain multiple appliance racks together to create a massive GreenPlum appliance farm. It posts some pretty expressive data load and data query rates, and i would love to put it side by side with the Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse and see how they stack up against each other as far as load times, and data processing times but I’m guessing that neuter company will loan me one of these massive devices for a few weeks.
After the sessions were done came the hard work, figuring out which parties to attend that night. I started with a dinner that my great VAR Ahead IT threw. From there i moved to the Emulex party and ended the night at Brocades party. Don’t get me wrong I wasn’t a perfect angel at these parties but i did take it easy as I do have to be able to do this all again next week at Tech Ed and there is the official EMC party tonight.
I’ve run out of time to blog as I’ve got to get to another sessions, so I’ll wrap up here. Sorry for any spelling errors and the lack of links. I’m using my iPad to write this and may not have caught all the problems.
Denny