Computerworld -
If you're like most enterprises, you have data everywhere. It's in line-of-business applications. It's in directories. It's in various departmental servers. It's in your e-commerce platform. To manage all this, most shops use databases of all sizes running on a variety of operating systems and database applications, often from different vendors and editions. Chances are, they're not consistent.
Microsoft believes it's solved much of the difficulty and brought a new outlook to the enterprise database world. The company's efforts center around the HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance, a one-stop, plug-it-in-and-consolidate machine that may be a good fit for a variety of implementations. The premise is that the DBC Appliance brings a private cloud directly into your data center, ready for you to begin hosting database workloads immediately. (The appliance is tagged with the "HP" moniker because it was developed mostly by Hewlett-Packard and uses that vendor's hardware.)
If you're interested in using this tool, Microsoft assumes you're well on your way, as an enterprise, to virtualizing key assets, and now it's time to take the next step and virtualize the infrastructure around your databases. The DBC Appliance is built to bring Infrastructure-as-a-Service concepts right to you, in one fell swoop. You can bring in all of your database instances from around your network and host them in a convenient, built-to-be-fault-tolerant-from-the-ground-up device that can grow as your data needs expand in the future.
In addition, you can abstract away the technical bits that confuse end users and deploy a platform by which business users can self-serve their own needs by setting up database hosting instances themselves, with secure, pre-configured templates that can also charge back to their unit the value of the services consumed by their database instances.
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Computerworld - If you're like most enterprises, you have data everywhere. It's in line-of-business applications. It's in directories. It's in various departmental servers. It's in your e-commerce platform. To manage all this, most shops use databases of all sizes running on a variety of operating systems and database applications, often from different vendors and editions. Chances are, they're not consistent.
Microsoft believes it's solved much of the difficulty and brought a new outlook to the enterprise database world. The company's efforts center around the HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance, a one-stop, plug-it-in-and-consolidate machine that may be a good fit for a variety of implementations. The premise is that the DBC Appliance brings a private cloud directly into your data center, ready for you to begin hosting database workloads immediately. (The appliance is tagged with the "HP" moniker because it was developed mostly by Hewlett-Packard and uses that vendor's hardware.)
If you're interested in using this tool, Microsoft assumes you're well on your way, as an enterprise, to virtualizing key assets, and now it's time to take the next step and virtualize the infrastructure around your databases. The DBC Appliance is built to bring Infrastructure-as-a-Service concepts right to you, in one fell swoop. You can bring in all of your database instances from around your network and host them in a convenient, built-to-be-fault-tolerant-from-the-ground-up device that can grow as your data needs expand in the future.
Common data-consolidation pitfalls
As IT looks to become more agile and take the use of virtualization to the next level, you might wonder what the private cloud-like approach to taming your organization's databases might look like. You might have spent time trying to unify and make consistent your approach to hosting databases by consolidating them across systems, for example.
As you got deeper into this process, however, your team would probably run into the common problems any enterprise administrator faces:
- Sourcing: It's almost impossible to get the same machine configured the same way from any hardware provider over time. Unless you have a massive budget and can purchase all of your hardware needs in a two to four month span, you're stuck cobbling together systems that might have different network cards, different hard drive vendors or even different processor levels, simply because of the march of time.
- Configuring: Do you have an integrated sense of all of your databases and their processor needs? Have you tested all of the permutations of hosting those databases on certain configurations? You might also be interested in consolidation, but sizing the current loads of your existing systems and matching them to your new infrastructure -- and doing so in a time- and cost-efficient way -- can be a challenge.
- Making it available: Even if you manage to overcome the first two obstacles, you still need a way to make your new infrastructure available to consumers within your organization. How will you respond to their requests for database creation or movement? How will you charge back the costs of running the solution to the correct business units? How will you ensure that your staff isn't inundated with tiny requests that come in all of the time?
In addition, you can abstract away the technical bits that confuse end users and deploy a platform by which business users can self-serve their own needs by setting up database hosting instances themselves, with secure, pre-configured templates that can also charge back to their unit the value of the services consumed by their database instances.
Although other vendors sell database appliances, Microsoft and HP claim this one is unique because it allows for a quick private-cloud setup, has a self-service aspect and lets everything run as a virtualized service.
I had a chance to test-drive a late prototype of the appliance and came away suitably impressed, with a couple of reservations. I walked through the appliance as it would be delivered to a potential customer. I created VMs from templates, imported databases, ran the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Tool (MAPS) in a lab network, set up new templates for self-service, configured chargeback and tested reports.
Let's take a look.
Heavy iron for the data center
The DBC Appliance, announced in October and available for purchase and delivery now, is a modular, scalable product that is sold in sizes from half a standard server rack all the way up to 10 racks. All of the components come together and are addressable as a single unit, making the appliance scalable. The hardware consists of:
- An HP BladeSystem C3000 enclosure.
- In the half-rack configuration: 4 dual-socket HP ProLiant BL465c G7 blade servers with 8 AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors and two 300GB drives per blade. This makes for 96 compute cores. It also has 1TB of RAM.
- In the full-rack configuration: 8 HP ProLiant BL465c G7 blade servers with 16 Opteron 6100 Series processors, also with two 300GB drives per blade. This makes for 192 cores, and it comes with 2TB of RAM.
- Two ProCurve E6600 10GBps switches and two ProCurve E2910 1GBps switches, for internal use among all of the components of the appliance.
- Two HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet Modules for connectivity to your data center.
- Four discrete internal power distribution units, for redundancy and high availability purposes.
- A storage array designed with storage blocks in mind (a storage block being hardware that delivers a predefined performance envelope). Here, the block is made up of one HP P2000 G3 10GbE iSCSI disk array, three HP D2700 disk racks, and 99 small form factor (SFF) spindles with 146GB and a speed of 15,000rpm. The half-rack has two storage blocks for 28TB of storage capacity, and the full rack has four blocks for 57TB of total available storage.
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