Is SQL Server Consolidation Old-School Now?
I’ve been having a bit of a debate on this very topic – where a major goal used to be trying to consolidate down your servers and try to optimize your configurations, now it’s quickly becoming the opposite.
It’s a much more complicated question now when it comes to consolidation, optimization, availability and so-on. In many, many cases, it’s a situation where you have work backwards into how best to deploy your systems. This can be especially true where you’re working through a hybrid solution.
Here are some key questions that may help get things started:
– Do you have data compliance and protection requirements? If so, a hybrid solution may be needed, keeping the protected information on-premise, perhaps consolidated into servers that you have the most control over. Alternatively, where clients have information in the cloud, compliance and data controls push for more servers, where you can split apart the servers and protect information by controlling access and interaction between the systems.
– Do you have "spikey" access and traffic patterns? If so, consolidation may help – but only in cases where your access patterns compliment each other – perhaps if you have one set of requirements that allow for OLTP work, then another for reporting and analysis that runs in different hours or time zones.
– Do you have to address scale at different "locations" in your application environment? If so, it may make a lot of sense to split those functions to different systems, so you can scale out those pieces of your environment, rather than having everything in a single location. An example of this might be where your storefront lives – if it experiences big waves of traffic, perhaps due to sales for example, you can scale out the shopping cart, while leaving the site browsing pieces on fewer instances.
It goes back to architecture and how you set things up with an eye to the future. Do you find that consolidation isn’t a "thing" any more? What do you do when you look at your systems and configurations?