With the hardware vendor selection narrowed down to Cisco UCS and Pure Storage, we took the opportunity to see if we could augment the design to leverage existing assets and hedge against unforeseen requirements, and hopefully save some money in the end.

Pimpin’ My Ride

One of the benefits to selecting this Cisco and Pure Storage configuration was that SQL Server MCM Argenis Fernandez (@DBArgenis) was the principal architect. It carried a lot of weight with me and other SQL developers knowing the elite amongst us designed the system from scratch, referencing Microsoft’s specifications end-to-end. Coupled with the fact that our WinTel and SAN engineers have already been working with the platforms for a couple of years, the deployment and migration should be easy.

One thing we took advantage of was that our EA with Microsoft had not expired. We were able to carry over our licensing to a new host which saved on our overall budget. We took advantage of the savings to add additional storage in areas not key to the primary data warehouse or data marts, but to act as a hedge against the challenges of working with late-arriving data and any surge in business requirements that needed to be fulfilled before the next capital cycle.

We started with the whitepaper configuration and made a couple of modifications…

  • Cisco C240M4

  • 24 cores of Intel E5-2670 @ 2.30 GHz

  • 768 GB RAM

  • Eight QLogic 16 Gb/s HBAs in dual active mode

  • Pure Store //m20 appliance with a 20 TB brick (for up to 50 TB user capacity at 2.5:1 compression)

  • 24 local SSDs on a Cisco 12Gb RAID controller (for temp DB, SQL snapshots and Staging)

    • 16 disk RAID 5 (Staging, snapshots; 11 TB usable)
    • 6 disk RAID 10 (TempDB, 2 TB usable)
    • dedicated hot spare for each

  • 10 Gb/s Ethernet

  • 2 Internal SSDs in RAID 1 for O/S, binaries and System DBs  (master, model, msdb)

While we were at it, we also procured an identical host for UAT (but shared the same Pure Storage //m20) as well as a Staging host with just the local SSD configuration.

Adding the hardware cost and SQL licensing for both Prod & UAT (it was deemed for effective to license UAT per core vs. paying for 100+ seats; we could also use UAT for DBCC checks as a result), the cost was approaching seven figures.

And now we had to prove it was money well spent…