microsoft sql server 2012 on hp proliant dl980 - scalability

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Microsoft SQLServer 2012 onHP ProLiantDL980Migrating Oracle on Sun platform to Microsoft SQLServer 2012 on HP ProLiant DL980

Scalability Experts

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ContentsExecutive Summary:...................................................................................................................................... 4

Introduction: .................................................................................................................................................4

Problem Statement...............................................................................................................................4

A Case for x86 Migration...............................................................................................................................5

SQL Server 2012 Advantages: .......................................................................................................................5

AlwaysOn: .............................................................................................................................................5

AlwaysON Windows Server Failover Clustering Instance ..................................................................... 7

Recovery Advisor: ................................................................................................................................. 9

Windows Server Core Support............................................................................................................10

Contained Database Authentication:..................................................................................................10

Table Partitioning up to 15,000 ..........................................................................................................10

Resource Governor Enhancements ....................................................................................................10

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 VS Oracle RAC..........................................................................................10

Security and Compliance: ...................................................................................................................13

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): ..........................................................................................................13

Total Cost of Administration: ..............................................................................................................15

Performance: ......................................................................................................................................15

HP ProLiant DL980: .....................................................................................................................................16

HP ProLiant DL980 Features: ..............................................................................................................16

Balanced scaling with the HP Smart CPU caching technology............................................................16

Self-healing resiliency .........................................................................................................................17

Network Connectivity .........................................................................................................................18

Efficient Power Supplies......................................................................................................................18

Thermal Logic Technologies................................................................................................................18

HP Advanced Memory Error Detection ..............................................................................................18

HP ProLiant DL980 Performance benchmarks:...........................................................................................19

Customer Success Stories: ..........................................................................................................................20

Intel Xeon E7: ..............................................................................................................................................21

Intel Xeon E7 Advantages: ..................................................................................................................21

Oracle to SQL Server migration advice: ......................................................................................................23

Main migration steps ..........................................................................................................................23

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SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) ..............................................................................................23

Conversion ..........................................................................................................................................24

Differences in SQL ...............................................................................................................................25

PL/SQL Conversion..............................................................................................................................26

Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................26

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Executive Summary:This document is intended for IT architects, data base administrators, system administrators, and developers whowant to migrate from Oracle on Sun platforms to SQL Server on standards based platforms. This paper will provideinformation as to how SQL Server on standards based scale up servers has been highly optimized, improvingthroughput, security and availability driving maximum ROI and minimum TCO. It includes comparisons oncompeting solutions and specific SQL Server and standards based platform features as well as capabilities that areimplemented in a system-wide approach to optimize performance, improved reliability, security and cost-effectiveness. This paper also provides detailed comparisons between Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server 2012 ontotal cost of ownership, new features in SQL Server 2012, customer migration success stories, migration path fromOracle databases to SQL Server 2012 and the challenges associated with the migration.

Microsoft has partnered with HP and Intel to provide an answer to the question plaguing every CTO’s mind – howto reduce cost without sacrificing security, reliability and performance. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 on HP ProLiantDL980 is a reliable enterprise platform that costs 5 times less than Oracle on Sun and is 7 times less costly tomaintain. Intel’s Xeon processor E7 family on DL980 can deliver better performance and reduce costs withincreased scalability. Organizations migrating from an older Sun SPARC environment could achieve even greaterperformance gains, enabling them to significantly consolidate the database environment or increase theperformance of each server by more than seven times without expanding the server footprint.

Introduction:

Problem StatementDatabase servers have been around for 50 years, but to find a reliable performing, feature rich and cost effectiveenterprise solution has always been a challenge not many customers have had success with. In the name ofreliability and performance, the software and hardware vendors have made this a difficult choice. On the lowerend there are cost effective solutions that do not provide the reliability and performance an enterprise requires.On the other end, there are rigid, high performing, reliable systems that are very expensive to maintain, but theymay lack the performance that tomorrow’s requirements dictate. To put things in perspective, a typical currententerprise database system based on an Oracle on Sun platform will cost upwards from $2 Million and a yearlymaintenance cost of around $7,000 per database, while a standards based solution like SQL Server 2012 on HPProLiant DL980 will cost only $220k in server licenses and $1,600 per database to maintain.1 Detailed costcomparisons are provided in the TCO section.

Oracle database servers on Sun platforms have been one such solution that has been marketed to enterprises as areliable, high performing OLTP system. Oracle database servers have been in the market for a long time, the latestversion being Oracle Enterprise Database 11g. The Sun platform is an aging proprietary platform and with Oracleowning Sun, the future releases would still be built on the same proprietary non-standard code base or the newhigh performance server hardware components. In essence, the customers are locked in to an expensive,proprietary solution.

1 Refer to TCO comparison

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A Case for x86 MigrationMicrosoft SQL server on Windows platform has been a successful competitor to Oracle Sun platform for the last 15years. There has been a common misconception that SQL Server is not enterprise ready. Now with Microsoftintroducing a major release of SQL Server (Microsoft SQL Server 2012), it provides a database server that will meetthe needs of the enterprise with 6 to 1 cost savings in favor of Microsoft SQL Server 2012. With AlwaysOn HA/DR(High Availability / Disaster Recovery) technology, it dispels any misconception that SQL Server is not enterpriseready.

Replacing power-hungry servers with new energy efficient hardware and running operating systems that supportenergy conserving processors results in lower consumption of energy with equal or greater performance. Powermanagement features enable you to save even more energy. For example, Oracle Sun SPARC T4 has a max powerrating of 240W. This is almost 2X the power consumption of the Intel Xeon E7 processor2. Servers that run missioncritical applications generally must run on a 24/7 basis, so energy savings add up fast. The HP ProLiant DL980 withIntel Xeon processor E7 Series with Windows Server 2012 platform provides energy saving features implementedin both the hardware and the software that can help companies comply with formal and informal environmentalmandates.

Based on AVNET3 analysis, consolidating three Sun SPARC M5000/32c servers on to one HP ProLiant DL980 G7/64cserver could result in an overall savings of 61% over three years, reduce power and cooling costs by 71%, reducesystem administration costs by 73%, reduce hardware and software support costs by 63% and reduce new Serverhardware costs by 77%.

The DL980 running Microsoft SQL 2012 was the first x86 server to support 25,000 users for the SAP two-tier Salesand Distribution Standard Application benchmark. For an enterprise that is looking to design an IT environmentwith balanced scaling, self-healing resiliency, and breakthrough efficiencies, the DL980 Server will be an idealchoice.

SQL Server 2012 Advantages:

AlwaysOn:SQL Server 2012 provides new capabilities called AlwaysOn. AlwaysOn is a new integrated, flexible, cost-efficienthigh availability and disaster recovery solution that was built on a very stable failover clustering platform.AlwaysOn has HA tools, database mirroring, clustering, log shipping and failover policy management all rolled intoone solution. SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn works better together and removes much of the customer required set upand tuning, thus helping eliminate potential configuration errors. New wizards make set up of availability groups abreeze, while dashboards ensure insight into the health of the HA solution. By using the SQL Server AlwaysOnfeature customers can achieve Multi-subnet failover clusters, i.e. you can configure a Failover Cluster node toconnect to a different set of subnets which can be either in the same location or in a geographically dispersedlocation thereby improving your High Availability Environment.

AlwaysOn Failover Cluster instances provide server-level redundancy on a certified Microsoft Cluster Servicesconfiguration like HL DL980 and enable seamless failover capabilities in the event of a CPU, memory, or other non-storage hardware failure. This is performed by sharing disk access between nodes and automatically restarting SQLServer on a working node in the event of a failure. AlwaysOn Failover Cluster instances support multisite clusteringacross subnets, which enables cross-data-center failover of SQL Server instances.

2 http://ark.intel.com/products/53580/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E7-8870-(30M-Cache-2_40-GHz-6_40-GTs-Intel-QPI)3 http://www.ts.avnet.com/uk/vendors/hp/servers/proliant/dl980_g7_server/competitive_attack.html

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For example, take a look at below figure. This illustrates an AlwaysOn Availability Groups deployment strategy thatincludes one primary replica and three secondary replicas. The synchronous data movement is used to providehigh availability within the primary datacenter and asynchronous data movement is used to provide disasterrecovery. Moreover, secondary replica 3 and replica 4 are employed to offload reports and backups from theprimary replica.

Also new, AlwaysOn Availability Groups greatly enhance the capabilities of database mirroring and help ensureavailability of application databases, and they enable zero data loss through log-based data movement for dataprotection without shared disks. AlwaysOn Availability Groups provide an integrated set of options includingautomatic and manual failover of a logical group of databases, support for up to four secondary replicas, fastapplication failover, and automatic page repair.

SQL Server 2012 also supports deployments on Windows Server Core, a minimal, streamlined deployment optionfor Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2008 R2. This operating system configuration can reduce planneddowntime by minimizing operating system patching requirements by as much as 60 percent according to aninternal Microsoft study. SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn can facilitate rolling upgrades and patching of instances,which helps significantly to reduce application downtime. Enhanced support for online operations like LOB re-indexing and adding columns with default values also helps to reduce downtime during database maintenanceoperations.

AlwaysOn Availability Groups provide an enterprise-level alternative to database mirroring, and it givesorganizations the ability to automatically or manually fail over a group of databases as a single unit, with supportfor up to four secondaries. Availability groups can also contain more than one availability database. This solutionprovides zero-data-loss protection and is highly flexible. It can be deployed on local storage or shared storage, andit supports both synchronous and asynchronous data movement. The application failover is very fast, it supportsautomatic page repair, and the secondary replicas can be leveraged to offload reporting and a number ofmaintenance tasks, such as backups. Availability groups are built on top of Windows Failover Clustering andsupport both shared and non-shared storage. Depending on an organization’s recovery point objective (RPO) andrecovery time objective (RTO)requirements, availability groups can use either an asynchronous-commit availability

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mode or a synchronous-commit availability mode to move data between primary and secondary replicas.Availability groups include built-in compression and encryption as well as support for file-stream replication andauto page repair. Failover between replicas is either automatic or manual.

The below table offers a rough comparison of the type of results that different solutions may achieve for HighAvailability:

High Availability and Disaster RecoverySQL Server Solution

PotentialData Loss(RPO)

PotentialRecoveryTime (RTO)

AutomaticFailover

ReadableSecondaries(1)

AlwaysOn Availability Group - synchronous-commit Zero Seconds Yes(4) 0 – 2

AlwaysOn Availability Group - asynchronous-commit Seconds Minutes No 0 – 4

AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) NA(5) Seconds-to-minutes

Yes NA

Database Mirroring(2) - High-safety (sync + witness) Zero Seconds Yes NA

Database Mirroring(2) - High-performance (async) Seconds(6) Minutes(6) No NA

Log Shipping Minutes(6) Minutes-to-hours(6)

No Not duringa restore

Backup, Copy, Restore(3) Hours(6) Hours-to-days(6)

No Not duringa restore

(1) An AlwaysOn Availability Group can have no more than a total of four secondary replicas, regardless of type.(2) This feature will be removed in a future version of Microsoft SQL Server. Use AlwaysOn Availability Groups instead.(3) Backup, Copy, Restore is appropriate for disaster recovery, but not for high availability.(4) Automatic failover of an availability group is not supported to or from a failover cluster instance.(5) The FCI itself doesn’t provide data protection; data loss is dependent upon the storage system implementation.(6) Highly dependent upon the workload, data volume, and failover procedures.

AlwaysON Windows Server Failover Clustering InstanceWindows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) provides infrastructure features that support the high-availability anddisaster-recovery scenarios of hosted server applications such as Microsoft SQL Server 2012.

A Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) is a single instance of SQL Server that is installed across WSFC nodes within sameor multiple subnets. FCI can leverage AlwaysOn Availability Groups to provide remote disaster recovery at thedatabase level. When a SQL Server instance is configured to be a FCI, the high availability of that SQL serverinstance is protected by the presence of redundant nodes in the FCI. Only one of the nodes in the FCI owns theWSFC resource group at a time and in case of failures the ownership is moved to another WFSC node.

If a WSFC cluster node or service fails, the services or resources that were hosted on that node can beautomatically or manually transferred to another available node in a process known as failover. AlwaysOn failovercluster instances can be combined with availability groups to offer maximum SQL Server instance and databaseprotection.

The nodes in the WSFC cluster work together to collectively provide these types of capabilities:

Distributed metadata and notifications. WSFC service and hosted application metadata is maintained on eachnode in the cluster. This metadata includes WSFC configuration and status in addition to hosted applicationsettings. Changes to the metadata or status on one node are automatically propagated to the other nodes inthe cluster.

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Resource management. Individual nodes in the cluster may provide physical resources such as direct-attachedstorage (DAS), network interfaces, and access to shared disk storage. Hosted applications, such as SQL Server,register themselves as a cluster resource, and they can configure startup and health dependencies upon otherresources.

Health monitoring. Internode and primary node health detection is accomplished through a combination ofheartbeat-style network communications and resource monitoring. The overall health of the cluster isdetermined by the votes of a quorum of nodes in the cluster.

Failover coordination. Each resource is configured to be hosted on a primary node, and each can beautomatically or manually transferred to one or more secondary nodes. A health-based failover policy controlsautomatic transfer of resource ownership between nodes. Nodes and hosted applications are notified whenfailover occurs so that they can react appropriately.

The logical topology of a representative AlwaysOn solution with WFSC is illustrated in this diagram:

Here is a brief table that explains the features of FCI and Availability Groups,

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Nodes within an FCI Replicas in Availability GroupUses WSFC cluster Yes YesProtection Level Instance DatabaseStorage Type Shared Non-Shared (except for FCI hosted replica)

Storage Solutions Direct attached, SAN, mount points, SMP Depends on node typeReadable Secondaries No

(Secondary nodes are readable in case of a failover or if theFCI belongs to an availability group)

Yes

Failover policy settings *WSFC Quorum*FCI Specific*Availability Group settings

*WSFC Quorum*Availability Group settings

Failed-over resources Server, instance and database Database only

Recovery Advisor:Database Recovery Advisor introduces significant user experience enhancements to the ways DBAs can restoredatabases using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). SQL Server provides a variety of backup types so creatingthe right recovery sequence for any point in time has to be managed closely. To help make this process much morestreamlined, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 introduces a new Recovery Advisor to help customers create a morepredictable and optimal restore sequence minimizing system downtime and DBA time.

Capabilities include a visual timeline (below figure) that presents the backup history of the database and theavailable points in time to which the user can restore the database, algorithms to streamline identifying the rightsets of backup media to get the database back to a specific point in time, and page restore dialog in SSMS to dopage-level restores of the database.

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Additionally, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 has the capability to split a backup into multiple files, known as Split FileBackup. This has two key advantages over single file backups:

Split file backups can be executed faster than single file backups because the separate backup files can bewritten on different disks in parallel.

Split file backups help reduce the backup file size to more manageable/desired sizes. These sizes can betailor-made to fit the capacity of available media

Windows Server Core SupportWindows Server Core is the GUI-less low footprint (50% less memory and disk utilization) version of Windows thatuses command prompt, remote admin tools and PowerShell for user interaction. By running SQL Server onWindows Server Core the OS patching can be reduced significantly which greatly reduces planned downtime. Thepercentage reduction in patching and OS reboots can be as much as 50-60% in certain environments depending onthe server roles that are enabled and the type of patches that are applied. Along with the AlwaysOn FCI andAvailability Groups, the database administrator can apply critical service packs to passive nodes or to secondaryreplicas, conduct a manual failover and apply the critical patches to the FCI node or replica. Combining server corewith AlwaysOn reduces system downtime significantly. Also, since the code base is small, the attack surface isgreatly reduced and overall security of the database platform is strengthened, which again translates to maximumavailability and data protection

Contained Database Authentication:Contained Database Authentication increases compliance by allowing users to be authenticated directly into userdatabases without logins. User information for login (username and password) is not stored inside masterdatabase but user databases directly. It is very secure because users can only perform DML (Data ManipulationLanguage operations like SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) operations inside the user databases and not databaseinstance level operations. It also reduces the need to login to the database instance and avoid orphaned or unusedlogins in the database instance. AlwaysOn also utilizes this feature to facilitate better portability of user databasesamong servers in the case of server failover without the need to configure logins for all database servers in thecluster.

Table Partitioning up to 15,000Microsoft SQL Server 2012 expands partition support from 1k to 15k. This increased support enables large slidingwindows scenarios. With expanded partition support, applications like SAP that take tens of thousands ofsnapshots of data in short periods of time, can significantly extend the length of time where data is held before it’spushed out to allow for new data to enter and generally makes it easier to manage these large amounts of data.This also helps streamline maintenance of large sets within file groups that need data switched in and out per theneeds of the data warehouse.

Resource Governor EnhancementsResource Governor enables customers to further ensure consistent performance for concurrent and mixedworkloads across different SQL Server applications, server consolidations and within private clouds. Customers candefine which workloads can take what percent of performance on any given resource.

Resource Governor in SQL Server 2012 brings more performance assurance and scale by increasing the maximumnumber of resource pools to 64 (from 20), adding a new maximum capacity setting on CPU utilization, and allowingaffinity of resource pools to CPU schedulers and Non Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) nodes.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 VS Oracle RACOracle RAC and its predecessor Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) have been around since the first release of OPS in 1992as part of Oracle 7 release. Oracle has implemented many product improvements over the years and Oracle RAC

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has achieved some market adoption. However, Oracle RAC is a complex and archaic architecture for mostcustomers to implement and support. Newer applications require much larger scale (more nodes) than thepractical scalability limits of Oracle RAC.

Enterprises will need to pay a much higher cost for Oracle RAC compared with a SQL Server solution that willsatisfy the equivalent requirements. Deploying Oracle RAC as a solution would cost more than 5X the SQL Serversolution. Oracle RAC does not provide more than 5X better performance, scalability, and high-availability thanMicrosoft SQL Server 2012.

As a result, very few customers (<5% of all Oracle customers - out of 380,000 Oracle customers there only 15,000production RAC customers worldwide – Based on Gartner4) have deployed the technology after evaluation.

An Oracle RAC solution is not a good investment for many organizations because it is too costly. Rather, customersshould look at SQL Server solutions as an alternative that satisfies their database requirements. For example, SQLServer gives a comparable response in terms of recovery time compared to Oracle RAC (see table below) whileproviding better overall pricing.

Oracle RAC 30 – 60 seconds*SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups 10 secondsSQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Failover Cluster 30 - 90 Seconds

*According to Oracle document entitled “Oracle Database High Availability Best Practices 11g Release 2” onrecovery times. 5

Oracle RAC is not a good solution for scale-out OLTP scenarios. Oracle RAC is not ideal for database operationssuch as bulk load, long-running transactions, and high-update applications because those operations require abigger buffer. Overall performance will suffer because Oracle RAC needs to transfer large amount of buffer amongthe nodes through the interconnect Cache Fusion. Another type of application that uses a lot of serialization (suchas Oracle’s sequence request and index update) will require a waiting period by the rest of the nodes and theoperations cannot be scalable.

According to an Oracle OpenWorld6 presentation, customers need to redesign their applications to use hashpartitioning to mitigate that issue. Oracle RAC best practice7 says that it cannot make a non-scalable applicationscale and suggests data partitioning to minimize the traffic inside the interconnect. Coincidentally, this approach isthe same as using Data Dependent Routing (DDR) and customers do not need to pay for the extra cost of OracleRAC to implement DDR. Moreover, Oracle documentation8 states that an application will not scale on Oracle RAC ifit does not scale on an SMP system.

In order to implement Oracle RAC successfully, customers need to follow Oracle’s Maximum AvailabilityArchitecture (MAA). MAA recommends having the exact same configuration of Oracle RAC in QA, Production, andDR environments. Plus, the Active Data Guard option is needed to ensure high availability between Production andDR. This massive requirement means additional licenses are required for Oracle RAC in QA and DR environments aswell as an expensive additional technology called Active Data Guard. In addition, special Oracle-certified switchesare required to implement Cache Fusion, a way for Oracle RAC to share memory among member nodes.

4 http://www.gartner.com/id=8768145 http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e10803/outage.htm#BABIDGFJ6 Oracle Open world Presentations: http://ioug.itconvergence.com/pls/apex/CILOUG.download_my_file?p_file=3827 Oracle Best Practices: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/downloads/twp-rac-bestpractices.pdf8 Oracle Documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/rac.111/b28254/design.htm

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Additionally redundant copies of switches are usually required for high-availability. These will add to the cost ofimplementing Oracle RAC and has resulted in a low adoption rate by the Oracle customer base. The very simplifiedcomparison table below illustrates an example of SQL Server vs. Oracle RAC software processor cost comparisonfor a 2-node production environment without the consideration of QA and DR environment (each node is a 2 CPU,quad core machine).

Pricing is based on price list for Enterprise Edition of SQL Server 20129 and Oracle 11gR210.

Component SQL Server Solution Oracle RAC SolutionCore Database USD$115K USD$380KHA option Included USD$184KTotal USD$115K USD$564K

Unlike Oracle, SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition provides more advanced functionality out-of-the-box, withoutthe need to buy additional options or separate products compared to Oracle in the area of high availability,disaster recovery, advanced security, data warehousing, advanced compression, manageability, non-relationaldata, advanced business intelligence, master data management, data quality, and complex event processing.

Here is a quick look at some of the customer success stories who evaluated Oracle RAC and SQL Server and whatmade them choose SQL Server on Windows to be their primary enterprise database platform.

City of Virginia Beach11:The City of Virginia Beach decided to deploy a solution based on Microsoft SQL Server 2012 data managementsoftware. “Microsoft technologies offer maximum flexibility, easy management, and an integrated, user-friendlyenvironment,” says Elena Balitsky, Team Leader, Database Administration Group. “With Microsoft, we can also getall the same functionality offered by other vendors at an unbeatable price.” Balitsky explains that “even thoughone of our departments deployed Oracle Real Application Clusters for a mission-critical application and contractedwith external Oracle consultants for support,” they ended up choosing Microsoft SQL Server 2012. The Oracle RealApplication Clusters (RAC) solution was costly and struggled to meet requirements. To achieve high availability forthese applications’ databases, Virginia Beach will take advantage of SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn, an enhancementof database mirroring that supports as many as four secondary databases, including two synchronous secondaries.To avoid competition for resources between the two applications, Virginia Beach will organize each into its ownAlwaysOn availability group, a logical collection of databases that automatically fail over even across subnets. Thesolution will replicate each database on a server in another location, providing database, machine, and data-centerredundancy.

Powerco12:Powerco is New Zealand's second largest electricity and gas Distribution Company. Powerco had previouslymaintained both Oracle RAC and Microsoft SQL Server platforms, which meant the business incurred the expenseof supporting, operating and maintaining two systems. Powerco sought to consolidate to a single server platformto help simplify its IT environment, and identified SQL Server as the most cost-effective and manageable solution.With the help of Microsoft Gold Partner, SQL Services Ltd, Powerco has commenced migration to SQL Server. Theconsolidation has enabled Powerco to eliminate significant costs, making it easier to manage and maintain systems

9 SQL Server 2012 Pricing: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/get-sql-server/licensing.aspx10 Oracle Pricing: http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list.pdf11 http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-SQL-Server-2012/City-of-Virginia-Beach/City-Cuts-Costs-Gains-High-Availability-and-Disaster-Recovery-Capabilities/71000000012112 http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-SQL-Server-2012/City-of-Virginia-Beach/City-Cuts-Costs-Gains-High-Availability-and-Disaster-Recovery-Capabilities/710000000121

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in-house, without the need to invest in external consultants. The migration to SQL Server has helped Powerco tostreamline its IT systems and cut total cost of ownership by $390,000 a year. Huw Griffiths - InfrastructureManager from PowerCo explains, “When we first set up Oracle we configured Oracle RAC to support active/activeclusters, high availability and automatic failover. However, Microsoft SQL Server has many of the same featuresand we can get the same redundancy from SQL Server as we can from Oracle. The Oracle platform was moreexpensive to license, maintain and support, particularly because of the specialized knowledge it required. It wasclear that migrating to SQL Server would save money. We’ve saved a significant amount of money, almost$390,000 per annum, in migrating from Oracle to SQL Server. We’ve been able to save on rack space, reducehardware, maintenance and licensing costs and have created numerous efficiencies through simplifying the serverenvironment”.

Security and Compliance:Since 2002, Microsoft’s SQL Server is the most secure of any of the major database platforms. SQL Server hasrecorded the fewest number of reported vulnerabilities — just 72 from 2002 through June 2012 — of anydatabase. These statistics were compiled independently by the National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST), the government agency that monitors security vulnerabilities by technology, vendor, and product.

In 2012 (Jan-June) alone, Oracle Database platforms have 22 security vulnerabilities identified, while Microsoft hasno security vulnerabilities reported in National Vulnerability Database (NVD-CVE).

SQL Server has been the most secure database by a wide margin: Its closest competitor, MySQL (which was ownedby Sun Microsystems until its January 2010 acquisition by Oracle) recorded 143 (2002-2012) security flaws or twiceas many as SQL Server.

By contrast, during a Ten-and-a-half year period spanning from 2002 through June 2012, the NIST CVE recorded483 security vulnerabilities associated with the Oracle database platform, the highest total of any major vendor.Oracle had more than seven times as many reported security flaws as SQL Server during the same time span. NISTCVE statistics recorded 163 security-related issues for the IBM DB2 platform during the same period.

SQL Server’s unmatched security record is the direct result of significant Microsoft investment in its TrustworthyComputing Initiative, which the company launched in 2002. In January 2002, Microsoft took the step of halting allnew code development for several months across its product lines to scrub the code base and make its productsmore secure.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO):The Enterprise Edition of Microsoft SQL Server costs much less than the Enterprise Edition of Oracle. Thiscomparison is only exaggerated when looking at the SQL Server 2012 Enterprise out of the box features like tablepartitioning, compression, online analytical processing (OLAP) and so on. With Oracle, some of these additionalfeatures can only be purchased13 separately for the Enterprise Edition, but SQL Server 2012 Enterprise edition hasall these additional features built-in.

The prices in the chart below use U.S. Dollars,

13 http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list-070617.pdf

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Oracle DB and SQL Server 2012 pricing based on server cores,

Hypothetical pricing details (with multiple cores and enterprise add-on’s)

The high-end Oracle server in the tables shown comes in at about $6,000,000 retail while the Microsoft SQL Server2012 comes in at just under $1,000,000. That’s a 5x price increase without 5x better performance from Oracle.

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Total Cost of Administration:Based on a recent Alinean study14, on average a Database Administrator (DBA) could manage over 65 missioncritical Microsoft SQL Server databases, while Oracle Database implementations required one DBA per 15 criticaldatabases. The corresponding annual cost for administration for these two databases comes out to $1,605 peryear per database for Microsoft SQL Server and $7,385 per year per database for Oracle Database; a 460%difference in annual cost of administration per database. Compared to their Oracle DBA counterparts, the SQLServer DBAs in these customer case studies were able to manage four times as many databases on average,yielding a $5,779 lower annual Total Cost of Administration (TCA) per database.

Measure Microsoft OracleAverage number of databases percompany

1780 234

Average number of users perdatabase

165 216

Average database size (GB) 290 627Mission critical databases 57% 53%Web-based databases 54% 21%Transaction-based databases 26% 47%Decision-support databases 20% 32%Databases supported per DBA 65.4 15.2Annual TCA per database $1,605 $7,385

Performance:Here are some of the real world performance benchmark studies on Microsoft SQL Server 2012.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 along with HP and XIO broke the TEMENOS T2415 performance record. At peak

performance, the system processed 11,500 transactions per second in online business testing and averaged morethan 10,000 interest accrual and capitalizations per second during close-of-business testing, processing 25 millioncapitalizations and account accruals in less than 42 minutes.

OpenText and Microsoft conducted performance and scalability testing16 on the email-monitoring and records-

management components of the OpenText ECM Suite running on the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 data-management software. The benchmark testing resulted in a new performance record, with a peak ingestion of995,000 email messages in a single hour, 14.8 million messages in a 24-hour period, and 171 messages a

ion volume.

TCB (Turnkey Converged Billing) built on SQL Server 2012 has been benchmarked to support 250 millionsubscribers. The 250 million-subscriber test exceeded the performance objectives for both invoicing andmediation, generating 26 million invoices within a six hour billing cycle, and mediating 4.9 billion Call Detail

Records (CDRs) within 12 hours, showing a near-linear scalability as the number of subscribers increased.

14 Alinean Study: http://alinean.com/PDFs/Microsoft_SQL_Server_and_Oracle-Alinean_TCA_Study_2010.pdf15 http://blogs.technet.com/b/sql_server_isv/archive/2011/11/18/temenos-t24-on-sql-server-2012-ctp3-sets-a-new-world-record-in-latest-high-water-benchmark.aspx16 http://socialassets.opentext.com/btc_benchmark_study

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Performance benchmark tests17 conducted by Siemens PLM validate the performance and scalability of MicrosoftSQL Server 2012 as an enterprise-class database management system for Teamcenter. The tests confirm that when

running on SQL Server 2012, Teamcenter can easily scale to 10,000 concurrent users while maintaining excellentperformance.

HP ProLiant DL980:The DL980 server is an ideal choice for enterprise-class OLTP databases which are I/O and memory intensive anddatabase consolidation scenarios. Online transaction processing (OLTP) applications generally consist of a databaseserver running a DBMS (database management system) package along with several application servers to processtransactions. OLTP systems such as large e-commerce websites must respond to spikes in demand from largenumbers of users and a high volume of transactions. These require large amounts of memory to maintainconnection context for every database object opened by a user.

With the scalability and expansion capabilities of the ProLiant DL980 and Microsoft SQL Server on MicrosoftWindows Server, growth in database capacity can be accommodated by scaling up. By scaling up, enterprise IT canoffer more efficient database capacity expansion within a single system without adding the complexity andoverhead of a database cluster. The DL980 supports up to 7.2TB of internal storage and up to 960TB of externalstorage. The balanced architecture of the DL980 enables enterprise to scale performance by increasing processorsand memory - with support for up to eight 10-core processors for up to 80 processor cores and up to 160 logicalprocessors with hyper-threading enabled, and up to 4TB of memory.

HP ProLiant DL980 Features: Intel Xeon Processor E7 family and 7500 series, with up to 10 cores per CPU, provide the performance

required for demanding scale-up applications and virtualization environments. 128 DIMM slots provide for maximum system capacity of 4TB of memory. Highly expandable CPU,

memory, and I/O capacity allow you to use computing resources efficiently. HP scalable designsupports up to eight processors, 80 processor cores, and 160 logical processors.

With 16 I/O slots, DL980 solves the I/O bottlenecks in enterprise deployment, which enables in higherI/O throughput performance for demanding OLTP applications.

HP ProLiant DL980 has the ability to grow in small increments from 16 cores to 80 cores per server,and from the small sized databases to hundreds of terabytes with HP’s converged infrastructure.

Flexible scaling options included adding new processors, memory, storage, and I/O cards, orupgrading to processors with more cores

Balanced scaling with the HP Smart CPU caching technologyHP developed node controller ASIC, which is integral to the HP PREMA Architecture, plays a critical role in enablingthe ProLiant DL980 G7 system to scale to eight processors while adding availability features. The HP ProLiantDL980 G7 contains up to eight processor sockets; each socket accepts a processor with up to ten cores. The HPPREMA Architecture groups the processor sockets into multiple “QPI islands” of two directly connected sockets.This direct connection provides the lowest latencies. Each QPI island connects to two node controllers (labeled“XNC” in the diagram). The system contains a total of four node controllers. Multiple links connect the nodecontrollers in pairs.

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Architectural block diagram of the HP PREMA Architecture in the ProLiant DL980 G7

Each node controller stores information about all data located in the processor caches. This functionality is called“smart CPU caching.” Smart CPU caching provides significant benefits for system performance:

• Minimized inter-processor coherency communication and reduced latency to local memory—Processorsin each QPI island have access to the smart CPU cache state stored in the node controller, thus eliminatingthe overhead of requesting and receiving updates from all other processors.

• Dynamic routing of traffic—When an inter-node-controller link is overused, HP’s dynamic routing avoidsperformance bottlenecks by routing traffic through the least-used path. In this way, the system uses allavailable lanes and maintains full bandwidth.

Self-healing resiliencyHP PREMA Architecture extends the advanced reliability of the Intel Xeon processor 7500/6500 series/E7 family inthe ProLiant DL980 G7 with a redundant system fabric. This interconnect fabric provides higher interconnectbandwidth and lower data error rates for improved resiliency. The redundant system fabric enables:

• Redundant data paths—the fabric’s provision of 50% more interconnect links (six here versus four inmost competitive 8-socket systems with no node controller) not only improves system performance, itminimizes downtime in the event of an interconnect link failure.

• Rapid recovery—improved error logging and diagnostics information means that OS and virtualmachines can attempt error recovery or administrators can easily take corrective actions. If a fatal erroroccurs, the DL980 G7 does a warm reset and captures the error log to assist in diagnosis. With the systemrunning, the administrator can then use the log to diagnose the error and take corrective action based ona single failure.

The HP PREMA Architecture in the ProLiant DL980 G7 enables key features of the Intel Xeon processor 7500/6500series/E7 family designed to detect and correct errors before they result in a system crash and to keep a record oferrors that caused a crash to assist in diagnosing and servicing the system later:

• Memory demand and patrol scrubbing - The system monitors and removes transient single-bit errorsbefore they accumulate into uncorrectable memory errors. Exceeding the threshold for error correctionrate triggers predictive memory de-allocation, or optionally invokes the use of the memory spare rank inplace of the suspect memory rank.

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Demand scrubbing corrects errors detected during a normal data read transaction. Patrol scrubbingpreemptively walks through all memory periodically to correct errors before the OS or an applicationaccesses the memory and crashes because of an uncorrectable multi-bit memory error. Demandscrubbing is enabled in the initial server release; patrol scrubbing will be added in a subsequent firmwarerelease. The functionality is independent of which OS you are running.

• Memory Correction Codes (ECC)—This traditional memory error correction coding can detect all double-bit errors and correct any single-bit error (Single Error Correct, Double Error Detect) or any single DRAMdevice failure (Double Device Data Correction).

Network Connectivity• Upgrade to 10-Gigabit networking with the cost-effective HP NC524SFP or HP NC523SFP Dual Port10GbE Module. The HP NC524SFP high-performance upgrade module combines the latest 10-Gigabitsilicon and dual ports with connectivity to both copper and fiber optic networks. The HP NC523SFP DualPort includes enhanced performance and reduced power requirements with latest 10GbE Networkingfrom Q-Logic.

Efficient Power SuppliesThe ProLiant DL980 G7 uses HP 1200W common slot power supplies. HP power supplies are the first to achievePlatinum certification. With 94% efficiency these power supplies provide $20-$80 savings per power supply peryear compared to competitive products18.

Thermal Logic TechnologiesThermal Logic is the HP portfolio of embedded server technologies designed to help you achieve an energyefficient data center. Thermal Logic includes the following key technologies:

• An array of thermal sensors that adjust fan speeds and powers only slots in use to provide optimalsystem cooling at the lowest power.

• Power Regulator—an OS-independent power management feature that enables dynamic or staticchanges in processor performance and power states to adapt to changing workloads.

• Dynamic Power Capping—A feature that enables you to reclaim trapped power and cooling capacity bysafely limiting server power consumption. This feature gives you the potential to expand data centercapacity up to triple existing capacity.

HP Advanced Memory Error DetectionBecause of higher memory error frequency, some server administrators are unnecessarily shutting down servers toreplace DIMMs that experience correctable errors. The best way to prevent unnecessary DIMM replacements is tofilter out superfluous errors and identify critical errors that can lead to a shutdown.

The HP Advanced Memory Error Detection Technology algorithm analyzes multiple parameters of correctablememory error events and intelligently detects when the system is at increased probability of a non-recoverable,uncorrectable memory error condition.

The algorithm performs calculations on 4-bit and 8-bit symbols instead of analyzing individual bits. It tracksmultiple parameters of correctable memory errors and, after considering several properties of the DIMM, itdecides when to notify the administrator to replace the DIMM. The algorithm does not prematurely alert

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customers to replace DIMMs based on single-bit errors because they negligibly increase the probability of anuncorrectable error.

The algorithm considers unique parameters of correctable memory errors for x8 DIMMs as compared to x4DIMMs. This is because advanced memory-correction control technologies cannot protect these DIMMs against acomplete DRAM chip failure. The algorithm also detects bank failures for x4 or x8 DIMMs because these failuresmay increase the probability of an uncorrectable memory error.

The HP iLO3 management processor sends an alert to the server’s administrator when a DIMM exceeds apredefined threshold for correctable memory errors or experiences an uncorrectable memory error. Theadministrator can view a log of correctable and uncorrectable memory error events through the IntegratedManagement Log (IML) as shown in Figures 3A and 3B. The administrator can access the IML using a supportedbrowser, even when the server is off. The administrator’s ability to view the event log when the server is off can bebeneficial when troubleshooting remote host server problems

HP Insight ControlHP Insight Control software is essential server management software that helps deploy servers quickly, allowingyou to proactively manage the health of virtual or physical servers, improve power consumption, and takecomplete remote control from almost anywhere

Integrated Lights-Out 3HP iLO 3 is a standard component of the HP ProLiant DL980 Server that facilitates server health and remote servermanageability. Because it includes an intelligent microprocessor, secure memory, and a dedicated networkinterface, iLO 3 is independent of the host server and its operating system.

The iLO 3 provides remote console performance up to eight times faster than the previous generation iLO 2processor—and equal to the performance of KVM and software-based remote management solutions. iLO 3 alsooffers three times faster virtual media performance compared to iLO 2. Booting a remote system from an iLOvirtual media device enables administrators to perform many tasks without visiting the server, for example, toperform upgrades, deploy an OS from network drives, and perform disaster recovery of failed operating systems.The iLO Advanced option upgrades the iLO firmware to enable virtual media and other advanced functionality.

HP ProLiant DL980 Performance benchmarks:Performance testing using industry standard benchmarks confirms the advantages of the HP PREMA Architecture.By reducing processor overhead, The ProLiant DL980 G7 server delivers better system performance for a diverseset of workloads than competitive 8-socket—and larger—systems. With up to 30% faster local memory access4

provided by the PREMA Architecture, workloads with affinity to local memory and the applications isolated to aprocessor or a QPI island can gain additional performance advantages. For example, VMs, SAP, Microsoft SQLServer, and High Performance Computing applications will experience performance gains on a DL980 G7 whencompared with glueless 8-processor systems.

TPC-H performance

On the TPC-H @ 3TB benchmark, the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 achieved 162,601.7 QphH@3000GB6 and the top priceperformance for non-clustered systems at $2.68 USD/[email protected] The TPC-H benchmark measures

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performance for complex data warehouse transactions for business intelligence solutions. This result showed thatthe ProLiant DL980 G7 server delivers better performance and much better price performance than othercompeting server manufacturers.

SAP SD performance

On the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark, the ProLiant DL980 G7 serverachieved 18,180 SAP SD Benchmark users, equivalent to a throughput of 1,986,330 fully processed order line itemsper hour or 99,320 SAPS (Figure 5).8 The ProLiant DL980 G7 achieved leading Windows performance results on thebenchmark, exceeding the Fujitsu 8-processor result by 13.6%. In addition, the DL980 G7 achieved excellent 8-processor performance scalability results compared to 4-processor results with the same processors (1.73x scalingover the 4-processor ProLiant DL580 G7) and compared to 8-processor results with a previous generation HPProLiant platform (2.2x scaling over the 8-processor ProLiant DL785 G6). The exceptional 4-processor to 8-processor scaling is a direct result of the smart CPU caching capability of the HP PREMA Architecture.

Customer Success Stories:

A Large Telecom company in APAC: Oracle Sun replaced with HP ProLiant running Windows

The customer changed from the legacy search application to Microsoft FAST Search and migrated from Oracledatabase to Microsoft SQL Server. In an informal proof of concept, the team demonstrated the performance ofFAST Search on the HP ProLiant DL980 and along with strong return on investment (ROI) and low total cost ofownership (TCO), the customer chose SQL Server 2012 running on DL980.

A Large real estate multiple listing company in USA: Scale up solution with HP ProLiantDL98020

“Database performance at MLS PIN is absolutely critical, as every saved millisecond affects millions of transactionseach day. That’s why we’re enthusiastic about the latest scale-up offering in the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server forour Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 environment. Based on our early evaluation, the raw horsepower combined withunprecedented resiliency will ensure our performance remains superior for years to come.”

-Matt Lavallee, Director of Technology MLS Property Information Network

M.D. Anderson Cancer Center"Our researchers demand premium levels of computing power, resilience, memory, and flexibility, which arereasons we’re interested in the new HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Server for high performance, scale-up computing.We’re particularly excited about the smart CPU caching technology, which will enable our research computationsand queries to complete faster. The substantial memory of the ProLiant DL980 Server is compelling also, becausesome of our data sets involve tens of thousands of tiny images of nucleotides from DNA strings that must be storedin memory and analyzed. All in all, we believe the ProLiant DL980 is a great server to support our expandingpatient care and research environments."- Krishna Sankhavaram, Director, Research Information Systems and Technology Development.

Monster Worldwide

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"To maintain our position as the premier global online employment solution, Monster Worldwide ® relies on ITtechnology solutions, services and support leadership from HP. After rigorous testing of HP’s ProLiant DL980 G7Server, we were pleased to see a performance increase of 300% at an extremely attractive price point. The trustedProLiant family now has a powerful new addition -- one that gives us confidence that the ProLiant DL980 server hasthe resiliency and scalability to easily handle spikes in demand as it runs our Microsoft SQL Server databases thatare so vital to our business. "- Chris Reno, VP, Global Systems Engineering and Operations.

Intel Xeon E7:The Intel Xeon processor E7 family delivers top-of-the-line performance in large, highly-resilient serverconfigurations designed to support today’s most demanding enterprise workloads. These processors extend theworld-record performance21 of the previous generation Intel Xeon processor 7500 series by as much as 40 percent.They also support up to twice the memory capacity and provide breakthrough support for data integrity and highavailability, by extending reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features of the previous generation.

The Intel Xeon processor E7 family provides more cores and cache and twice the memory capacity of itspredecessors. A single eight-socket server based on the Intel Xeon processor E7 family provides up to 80 cores, 160threads, and 4 TB of memory. It also includes new energy features such as a lower-power Intel Scalable MemoryBuffer that delivers a power savings up to 155 watts per 256GB of memory, low-voltage DIMMs that save up to 15-20% watts per DIMM, and Intel Intelligent Power Technology that conserves energy by reducing server active andidle power states .

This processor family also includes additional RAS and security features that help to deliver even higher levels ofdata integrity and system resilience, while making it easier for IT organizations to protect vital business assets.

Intel Xeon E7 Advantages:

RAS FeaturesThe Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family expands on the reliability features in Intel Xeon processors such as MachineCheck Architecture Recovery (MCA-R), with more advanced enhancements like,

Double Data Device Correction (DDDC): Extends reliability by recovering from two DRAM device failures,instead of a single failure of SDDC, helping maximize uptime.

Partial Memory Mirroring: Enables more flexible, effective, and cost-efficient memory mirroring of criticalareas, instead of all memory, reducing server energy demands while protecting critical data.

The Intel Xeon processor E7 family implements a powerful collection of RAS features built around continuous self-monitoring and self-healing. Self-monitoring enables a system to actively and passively monitor all its keyinterconnects, data stores, data paths, and subsystems for errors. Self-healing features enable the server toproactively and reactively repair known errors and minimize future ones by acting automatically based onconfigurable DCE thresholds. By collaborating with hardware, the OS, virtual machine monitor (VMM), andapplication vendors, Intel enables tight integration and broad support for new, silicon-based RAS features acrossthe hardware and software stack.

The Intel Xeon processor E7 family’s RAS feature set accomplishes three main goals—it protects data, increasessystem availability, and minimizes planned downtime.

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Data Protection

Preserving data integrity is the foundation for RAS processing, from both computational and data managementperspectives. The Intel Xeon processor E7 family provides advanced support for error detection, correction, andcontainment across all major components and communication pathways. It does this by reducing circuit-levelerrors, detecting and correcting data errors, and containing uncorrectable errors, thus limiting their impact acrossthe system. Ensuring data integrity helps avoid computation and database corruption.

Increased availability

The Intel Xeon processor E7 family supports high levels of system availability through the use of multiple levels ofredundancy and OS-assisted recovery from certain uncorrectable errors that would have brought down previous-generation servers.

Memory: To further increase fault-tolerance, the Intel Xeon processor E7 family includes mechanisms formemory entity sparing, mirroring, and failover. Sparing and mirroring are two RAS features that allow on-the-fly failover from a failing component to another component. Sparing allows failover to a physicalspare in the same memory controller, and mirroring preserves data in the case of DRAM componentfailure.

Processor/socket: At the CPU and socket level, the Intel Xeon processor E7 family provides internal on-dieerror protection that guards processor registers against transient faults, and also enables dynamicfeatures that handle errors at the Intel QPI and the PCIe channels.

Server: At the highest level, the Intel Xeon processor E7 family supports interactions with the operatingsystem, VMM, and application software running on the server to enable recovery from errors that cannotbe corrected by hardware.

Minimize planned downtime

The Intel Xeon processor E7 family provides enhanced serviceability through support of predictive failure analysisand electronically-isolated hardware partitioning. By reporting hardware-corrected errors up the software stack tothe OS and management layers, the Intel Xeon processor E7 family allows analysis of error patterns that can beused to predict component failure before the actual failure occurs, thus enabling preventative maintenance duringplanned downtime. Likewise, the Intel Xeon processor E7 family allows IT to maintain isolated partitions instead ofsystems, which can reduce administrative costs and enhance the ease of compliance to customer SLAs.

In older processor technologies and other x86 processors, uncorrectable memory and hardware errors are almostalways fatal, bringing system operation to a halt and causing major problems for those workloads. In order tomitigate this limitation, the RAS features of the Intel Xeon processor E7 family are designed to cooperate andcommunicate with the software stack—from the BIOS and VMM/OS layers to the application layers—to handleuncorrectable errors in ways that were not previously possible in x86 servers.

Proactive error prevention

Windows Server 2012 supports Machine Check Architecture (MCA) recovery, as well as Corrected Machine CheckInterrupt (CMCI). The operating system logs corrected errors allowing for predictive failure analysis.

Reduced MTTR

In order to keep applications running during planned maintenance, the Intel Xeon processor E7 family andWindows 2012 support processor/memory on-lining and socket/memory migration. These latter features allowself-healing in the presence of processor and memory faults.

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MCA recovery is an Intel Xeon processor E7 family feature that allows the silicon layer to enlist the support of OS,VMM, and even application software to enable recovery from errors that cannot be corrected in the hardware.The Intel Xeon processor E7 family MCA extensibility presents a level of collaboration between hardware andsoftware in the isolation and repair of uncorrectable errors that was impossible up to now. This escalation fromsilicon to OS to application, where each system layer uses the specific knowledge it has about the impact of theerror on the overall system and application/service operation, is a very powerful model for collaborative hardware-software uncorrectable error recovery.

Oracle to SQL Server migration advice:

Main migration stepsThe first migration step is to decide on the physical structure of the target SQL Server database. In the simplestcase, you can map the Oracle tablespaces to SQL Server filegroups.

The next step is to choose how to map the Oracle schemas to the target. In SQL Server, schemas are notnecessarily linked to a specific user or a login, and one server contains multiple databases.

You can follow one of two typical approaches to schema mapping:

By default in SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA,) every Oracle schema becomes a separate SQL Serverdatabase. The target SQL Server schema in each of these databases is set to dbo—the predefined name for thedatabase owner. Use this method if there are few references between Oracle schemas.

Another approach is to map all Oracle schemas to one SQL Server database. In this case, an Oracle schemabecomes a SQL Server schema with the same name. To use this method, you change the SSMA default settings.Use this method if different source schemas are deeply linked with each other.

SSMA applies the selected schema-mapping method consistently when it converts both database objects and thereferences to them.

After you chose your optimal schema mapping, you can start creating the target SQL Server database and itsrequired schemas. Because the SQL Server security scheme is quite different from Oracle’s, we chose not toautomate the security item migration in SSMA. That way, you can consider all possibilities and make the properdecisions yourself.

The typical SSMA migration includes connecting to the source Oracle server, selecting the server that is runningSQL Server as the target, and then performing the Convert Schema command. When the target objects are createdin the SSMA workspace, you can save them by using the Load to Database command. Finally, execute the MigrateData command, which transfers the data from the source to the target tables, making the necessary conversions.The data migration process is executed on the server that is running SQL Server.

SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA)

OverviewSSMA automates migration of most database objects, including stored procedures, functions, packages andtriggers. There are few special data types like object type or spatial type that aren’t supported by the currentversion of SSMA. In addition, complex PL/SQL statements cannot be automatically converted. SSMA can be used torun a migration assessment on the source Oracle database schema to determine objects that cannot be converted.

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Database migration AssessmentSSMA assessment tool provides a summary assessment report with the following information,

Schema tree view: a list of objects from the source Oracle database schema. Conversion rate: the percentage of statements that SSMA is able to convert automatically. Object count: the number of database objects found in the Oracle schema and a count of objects “With errors”. Conversion Message summary: a description of the issues encountered while migrating the source Oracle schema

SSMA Conversion messages,

An error message is raised when SSMA is not able to convert a database object or a statement within a databaseobject.

A warning message is raised when SSMA is able to convert the Oracle statement, but the converted statement maynot produce the same result for some cases. For example, SSMA converts Oracle SUBSTR() to SQL Server SUBSTRING().In most cases, SUBSTRING() would return the same outputs. There are some situations, however, where the results aredifferent. For example, the Oracle SUBSTR() function supports negative values for character position.SUBSTR(‘TechNet’,-3,3) returns ‘Net’ in Oracle, whereas SUBSTRING(‘TechNet’,-3,3) would return an empty string inSQL Server.

An information message is for SSMA to provide additional information about how it converts certain objects.

ConversionNot all Oracle database objects have direct equivalents in SQL Server. In many cases, SSMA creates additionalobjects to provide the proper emulation. General conversion rules are as follows:

Each Oracle table is converted to a SQL Server table. During the conversion, all indexes, constraints, andtriggers defined for a table are also converted. When determining the target table's structure, SSMA usestype mapping definitions.

An Oracle view is converted to an SQL Server view. The only exception is the materialized view, whichbecomes an ordinary table. SSMA creates emulations for commonly used Oracle system views.

Oracle stored procedures are converted to SQL Server stored procedures. Oracle user-defined functions are converted to SQL Server functions if the converted function can be

compatible with SQL Server requirements. Otherwise, SSMA creates two objects: one function and onestored procedure. The additional procedure incorporates all the logic of the original function and isinvoked in a separate process. SSMA emulates most of the Oracle standard functions.

Oracle DML triggers are converted to SQL Server triggers, but because the trigger functionality is different,the number of triggers and their types can be changed.

Some Oracle object categories, such as packages, do not have direct SQL Server equivalents. SSMAconverts each packaged procedure or function into separate target subroutines and applies rules forstand-alone procedures or functions. In addition, SSMA can emulate some commonly used Oracle systempackages.

Oracle sequences can be converted to SQL Server sequences. Oracle private synonyms are converted to SQL Server synonyms stored in the target database. SSMA

converts public synonyms to synonyms defined in the sysdb database.Schema ConversionSSMA has many options for schema conversion. SSMA provides default data type mapping between Oracle andSQL Server. However, there is an option to customize the data type mapping for a specific table, for all tables, for aspecific object (such as a stored procedure or function) or for different usage (such as data type in column, datatype in variable or data type in input/output parameter of your procedure).

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When an object contains a statement that SSMA is unable to convert automatically, the tool will add a migrationerror description, comment on the specific statement or replace it with a generic type. This isolation approachmakes it possible to continue with the database migration and resolve the issues later.Data Type ConversionSSMA supports the ANSI and DB2 types implemented in Oracle, as well as the built-in Oracle types. SSMA typemapping is applied to table columns, subprogram arguments, a function's returned value, and to local variables.Usually the mapping rules are the same for all these categories, but in some cases there may be differences. InSSMA, mapping rules can be adjusted for some predefined limits. Custom mappings can be established for thewhole schema, for specific group of objects, or to a single object.

Common Oracle Data type mapping to SQL Server:

Oracle SQL Server

1 DATE Date and time DATETIME DATE DATETIME2

2 INTEGER Up to 38 digits Integer NUMERIC(38) BIGINT INT

3 RAW(n) 1⇐ n⇐ 2000 Variable-length binary VARBINARY(n)1 ⇐ n⇐ 8000Different SQL INSERT syntax

4 VARCHAR2(n) 1⇐ n⇐ 4000 Variable-length string VARCHAR(n) 1⇐ n⇐ 8000

Spatial DataSQL Server 2012 also supports spatial data. They are implemented as SQL CLR types named geography andgeometry. The geography type allows you to store objects defined by coordinates on Earth's surface, and thegeometry type is used for planar objects. SQL Server 2012 spatial data types implement methods for importing andexporting data in Well Known Text (WKT) and Well Known Binary (WKB) formats that are defined by OpenGeospatial Consortium (OGC) specification. Spatial functionality is supported in all editions of SQL Server 2012,including Express.

Differences in SQLOracle and SQL Server use different dialects of the SQL language, but SSMA can solve most of the problemsintroduced by this. For example, Oracle uses CONNECT BY statements for hierarchical queries, while SQL Serverimplements hierarchical queries by using common table expressions. The syntax of common table expressionsdoes not resemble the Oracle format, and the order of tree traversal is different.

Or consider how SSMA handles another nonstandard Oracle feature: the special outer join syntax with the (+)qualifier. SSMA converts these queries by transforming them into ANSI format.

Oracle pseudocolumns, such as ROWID or ROWNUM, present a special problem. When converting ROWNUM,SSMA emulates it with the TOP keyword of the SELECT statement if this pseudocolumn is used only to limit the sizeof the result set. If the row numbers appear in a SELECT list, SSMA uses the ROW_NUMBER( ) function. The ROWIDproblem can be solved by an optional column named ROWID, which stores a unique identifier in SQL Server.

SSMA does not convert dynamic SQL statements because the actual statement is not known until execution timeand, in most cases, it cannot be reconstructed at conversion time. There is a workaround: The Oracle metabasetree displayed in SSMA contains a special node named Statements in which you can create and convert ad hoc SQL

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statements. If you can manually reproduce the final form of a dynamic SQL command, you can convert it as anobject in the Statements node.

PL/SQL ConversionThe syntax of Oracle’s PL/SQL language is significantly different from the syntax of SQL Server’s procedurallanguage, Transact-SQL. This makes converting PL/SQL code from stored procedures, functions, or triggers achallenge. SSMA, however, can resolve most of the problems related to these conversions. SSMA also allowsestablishing special data type mappings for PL/SQL variables.

Some conversion rules for PL/SQL are straightforward, such as converting assignment, IF, or LOOP statements.Other SSMA conversion algorithms are more complicated. Consider one difficult case: converting Oracleexceptions. Emulating Oracle behavior as exactly as possible, but the code will need to be reviewed in order toeliminate dependencies on Oracle error codes and to simplify the processing of such conditions asNO_DATA_FOUND.

Oracle cursor functionality is not identical to cursor functionality in SQL Server. SQL Server provides two interfacesfor Oracle cursor migration. Packages cursor will need special handling during migration.

Oracle transactions are another conversion issue, especially autonomous transactions. In many cases properreview of the code generated by SSMA has to be done to make the transaction implementation achieve the pre-migration functionality.

Finally, many PL/SQL types do not have equivalents in Transact-SQL. Records and collections are examples of this.SSMA can process most cases of PL/SQL record and collections usage.

ConclusionBased on the research, Scalability Experts (SE) has concluded that Microsoft SQL Server 2012 on HP ProLiant DL980provides significant performance improvement and reliability at a lower TCO over Oracle on Sun. A quick summaryof the advantages of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 on HP ProLiant DL980 is given below:

Standards based scalable server based on latest Intel Xeon chips: The DL980 supports up to 7.2TB ofinternal storage and up to 960TB of external storage. The balanced architecture of the DL980 enablesenterprise to scale performance by increasing processors and memory - with support for up to eight 10-core processors for up to 80 processor cores and up to 160 logical processors with hyper-threadingenabled, and up to 4TB of memory.

Enterprise class OLTP database with AlwaysOn/FCI disaster recovery/failover: AlwaysOn is a newintegrated, flexible, cost-efficient high availability and disaster recovery solution that was built on a verystable failover clustering platform. AlwaysOn has HA tools, database mirroring, clustering, log shippingand failover policy management all rolled into one solution.

Lower TCO: The Enterprise Edition of Microsoft SQL Server costs as much as 5 times less than theEnterprise Edition of Oracle. This comparison is only exaggerated when looking at the SQL Server 2012Enterprise out of the box features like table partitioning, compression, online analytical processing (OLAP)and so on.

Migration: Microsoft provides SQL Server Migration Assistant. SSMA automates migration of mostdatabase objects, including stored procedures, functions, packages and triggers. There are few specialdata types like object type or spatial type that aren’t supported by the current version of SSMA. Inaddition, complex PL/SQL statements cannot be automatically converted. SSMA can be used to run a

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migration assessment on the source Oracle database schema to determine objects that cannot beconverted.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 on HP ProLiant DL980 therefore provides customers with a significant amount of costsavings compared to Oracle database on Sun. It offers high availability and reliability to customers for theirmission-critical business applications, while at the same time providing exceptional ease of use.

microsoft sql server 2012 on hp proliant dl980 - scalability

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