Customer profile

Company: Dell, Inc.

Industry: Technology

Country: United States

Founded: 1984

Employees: 65,000+

Website: www.dell.com

Business needDell IT needed to accommodate the rapid growth of online retail transactions while ensuring an outstanding customer experience and improving the efficiency of IT operations.

SolutionThe Dell team upgraded to Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 deployed on Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers for improved performance, greater server consolidation, and more efficient management.

“In the past, it might have taken us hours to capture and profile server performance information. Now we have the data we need to resolve issues in a few minutes using the capabilities in SQL Server 2008 R2.”

Reinaldo Kibel, Senior Database Engineer, Database Management, Dell, Inc.

Dell increases server consolidation by five times through migration to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 on Dell PowerEdge servers

Benefits

• Enhanced the efficiency of IT, increasing server consolidation by a factor of five

• Cut operating costs by US$64,000 per year for power, cooling, and support

• Accelerated problem resolution time from hours to minutes, saving approximately $1,500 per incident

• Improved IT management efficiency and increased application availability with new capabilities from SQL Server 2008 R2

• Clustering• Consolidation• Database• Management/Utilities

“If any of those servers are down, our Web site is down,” says Reinaldo Kibel, senior database engineer for the Dell IT database management practice. “The SQL servers play a very important role not only from a customer service standpoint but also from a financial standpoint. They have a direct impact on our day-to-day business.”

Given the criticality of the systems supported, upgrading the SQL Server infrastructure is not a decision that Dell takes lightly. But with online sales expanding and the addition of 16 TB of data from other enterprise functions, the Dell IT team found that the amount of data in the SQL databases was growing rapidly. “When volumes grow, application performance tends to decline, which can frustrate online customers,” says Kibel. “We needed to accommodate growth and sustain strong performance.”

The Dell team also needed to increase the efficiency of SQL Server management. “With 24-hour operations across the globe, IT technicians around the world pass SQL Server management off to the next geographical team as the day ends in one time zone and starts in another,” says Kibel. “Because the technicians did not all have the same management view, that transfer was a difficult and time-consuming process. We needed ways to enhance the efficiency of that process so administrators could spend more time on strategic projects.”

Additionally, the IT group needed to assure internal product groups that the expanding SQL environment, which was running on virtualized servers, would not affect the performance of other systems. “We were able to place approximately

10 databases on each physical server,” says Kibel. “We planned to consolidate further, but we needed to be sure we would not sacrifice the performance of other virtualized applications.”

Addressing challenges with SQL Server 2008 R2 on a new Dell hardware infrastructure

To address these challenges, the Dell team decided to upgrade the databases for Dell.com from Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and 2005 to SQL Server 2008 R2. SQL Server 2008 R2 includes new capabilities designed to help reduce data volumes, ensure strong database performance, and simplify administration.

At the same time, the team upgraded its hardware to Dell PowerEdge R910 and PowerEdge R710 servers equipped with the latest Intel® Xeon® processors.“We can give online customers and internal users the performance they need with the new servers. The PowerEdge R910 provides the high performance and

Of the more than 5,000 servers running Microsoft SQL Server at Dell, none are more vital to the company’s business than those supporting the online retail site at Dell.com. SQL Server systems provide the foundation for applications that retain credit card information and customer data, manage the online shopping cart, and deliver a dynamic product catalog by allowing users to custom-configure the systems they want to purchase.

“The migration has helped us increase our internal efficiency tremendously—our infrastructure is helping to lower our operating costs while supporting a growing business.”

Reinaldo Kibel, Senior Database Engineer, Database Management, Dell, Inc.

Technology at work

Hardware

Dell™ PowerEdge™ R910 servers with the Intel® Xeon® processor 7500 series

Dell PowerEdge R710 servers with the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series

Dell/EMC CLARiiON® CX3-80

Dell/EMC® Symmetrix 3309

Software

Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2

redundancy we need to run business-critical, customer-facing Dell.com applications. The PowerEdge R710 gives us great database performance in a smaller, 2U size,” says Kibel. “The increased memory capacity and bandwidth delivered with the latest Intel processors also helps us to maximize the number of virtual machines we can run on each physical host.”

Using open-standard Dell servers made the upgrade a pain-free experience. “With Dell servers, migrating SQL Server systems does not require any kind of rebuilding, even when migration also involves a hardware upgrade,” says Kibel. “You can do an in-place upgrade from SQL Server 2000 or 2005 to SQL Server 2008 R2 without rebuilding any schema.”

To provide reliable storage for SQL Server data, the Dell team selected a Dell/EMC storage area network (SAN). The team used Dell/EMC Symmetrix® storage to ensure high throughput and availability for production nodes and economical Dell/EMC CLARiiON® storage for non-production nodes. “Due to the tight relationship between Dell and EMC, Dell/EMC storage products do an admirable job of helping to prevent corruption,” Kibel says. “We work hard in conjunction with EMC to provide robust storage subsystems for databases.”

Boosting server consolidation and maintaining high performance

The IT group is now able to run more databases per server using the data compression technology built into Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. “Being

able to write and read smaller chunks of data improves I/O and helps keep performance high for the virtual servers,” says Kibel. “Improving I/O was the last hurdle for increasing our consolidation ratio—with the data compression technology we can consolidate up to 50 databases on the same host server compared with 10 per server without it.”

While the compression feature in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 enables the team to consolidate the infrastructure, the Resource Governor feature in the software gives internal business groups the confidence to run their critical applications in the consolidated environment. “The Resource Governor lets us set a threshold for processor usage that no one application or database can exceed. No one activity can take over 30 percent of a data field, for example, and slow down other activities,” says Kibel. “More business units are willing to share these servers because they are not worried that their applications will lose performance. Greater participation in this environment helps us drive down costs.”

Saving US$64,000 per year in operating costs

By increasing server consolidation, the IT group can use fewer physical data center resources and cut costs appreciably. “Each server was averaging around US$1,300 per year for power, cooling, administration, and support,” says Kibel. “Now we are saving approximately US$64,000 per year by consolidating up to 50 applications on each physical Dell PowerEdge server. We can reinvest

“Our technicians around the world now have an efficient way to seamlessly hand off work from one time zone to another, ensuring a smooth customer experience.”Reinaldo Kibel, Senior Database Engineer, Database Management, Dell, Inc.

those savings into new services or capabilities that will have a positive impact on the customer experience.”

Increasing IT efficiency and accelerating problem resolution from hours to minutes

To address the need for enhanced 24-hour server management across the globe, the team capitalized on the Central Management Server (CMS) capability in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. CMS allows the team to register all 5,000 SQL servers in a centralized repository on a single physical server. “With CMS in place, every authorized person in our organization has the same view, across the globe. Administrators can simply click to connect to a server and start managing it,” says Kibel. “Our technicians around the world now have an efficient way to seamlessly hand off work from one time zone to another, ensuring a smooth customer experience.”

The IT group is already upgrading to SQL Server 2008 R2 to add capabilities that can help sustain database and application performance by pinpointing problems quickly. “We are using the Utility Control Point (UCP) feature to capture performance data on the SQL servers,” says Kibel. “If SQL consumption for a processor is high, we can narrow the issue down to a particular daily business process. In the past, it might have taken us hours to capture and profile server

performance information. Now we have the data we need to resolve issues in a few minutes using the capabilities in SQL Server 2008 R2.”

Meanwhile, the clustering capabilities available with SQL Server 2008 R2 are helping the IT group ensure the availability of SQL Server–based applications. “Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster brings in new features specifically for SQL Server 2008 R2 when coupled with Hyper-V and CMS. It allows for live migration of an SQL server from one node to another with zero loss of data and zero perceived downtime,” says Kibel. “By setting up server clusters across geographically dispersed sites using database mirroring, we can fail over to another physical data center to protect data while still minimizing downtime.”

Improving the customer experience

By providing better performance and availability for customer-facing applications supported by SQL Server, the migration will help deliver a more robust and responsive customer experience. “Today we can continue to deliver an excellent customer experience even as we accommodate more customers and more information,” says Kibel. “At the same, the migration has helped us increase our internal efficiency tremendously—our infrastructure is helping to lower our operating costs while supporting a growing business.”

October 2010. © 2010 Dell Inc. Dell is a trademark of Dell Inc. Microsoft, the Microsoft logo, SQL Server, and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Intel, the Intel logo, and Intel Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. This case study is for informational purposes only. DELL MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS CASE STUDY. G10003200

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