Kevin Kline and Sumeet Bansal presented a session talking about a very high volume customer and some lessons-learned regarding working in this environment. The volume was such that the standard things you might think about, from spindles to CPU to RAM just became ineffective.
I learned a lot about the physical limitations of hardware (it’s going to be very tough to get standard disk drives over 15k RPMs for example) and some other overall architecture limitations that forced a look at other solutions for storage and retrieval overall. Some key things I learned though –
– you’ll want to have one NIC for ever 16 cores. This comes from the fact that there is overhead to manage the data flow and it takes processing power. You don’t want to overpower the NICs, nor do you want to have the contention between the two causing issues with the processing.
– use 10G NIC adapter – go all out – it matters. This seems obvious, but I suspect there are systems out there that may not be fully upgraded and this could certainly cause issues.
– SQL Server Profiler is going away for the relational engine – you need to find another tool to get the job done. It’ll still be available for Analysis Svcs, but the relational engine, not so much.
– There *are* solutions to support the throughput you need if this type of environment is something you’re working with. Fusion-IO, the partner in the keynote, showed off some screaming technology – it could easily make the difference between night and day for the processing times for your systems.
One very interesting result that was found and talked about was the plateau they were seeing as they would ask disk pairs, new hardware, etc. in support of the need to grow. There were very distinct plateaus where it just didn’t help any more. The same was true, in fact, when they talked about breaking your database files apart – there is a crossover point with number of segments and overall performance. Greater than 8 and you see a decrease in performance, rather than a help to performance.
Good information!