SQL Server Hardware - Red Gate Software

Table of Contents
Introduction ....................................................................................11
Chapter 1: Processors and Associated Hardware .........................17
SQL Server Workload Types .................................................................................................18
Evaluating Processors ............................................................................................................19
Cache size and the importance of the L2 and L3 caches .......................................... 20
Clock speed .......................................................................................................................22
Multi-core processors and hyper-threading ................................................................23
Hyper-threading ...............................................................................................................27
Processor Makes and Models ...............................................................................................30
Intel Xeon processors....................................................................................................... 31
Intel Itanium and Itanium 2 .......................................................................................... 42
AMD Opteron processors .............................................................................................. 44
Server Motherboards: how to evaluate motherboards and chipsets .............................47
Number of sockets .......................................................................................................... 48
Server chipsets ................................................................................................................. 49
BIOS ................................................................................................................................... 50
Memory requirements ..................................................................................................... 51
Network Interface Cards .................................................................................................55
Choosing a Processor and Motherboard for Use with SQL Server ................................56
Summary ..................................................................................................................................58
Chapter 2: The Storage Subsystem ..............................................60
Disk I/O .................................................................................................................................. 60
Drive Types ..............................................................................................................................63
Magnetic disk drives ....................................................................................................... 64
Solid-state drives ..............................................................................................................65
Internal Storage ..................................................................................................................... 68
Attached Storage ................................................................................................................... 69
Direct Attached Storage .................................................................................................69
Storage Area Network ..................................................................................................... 70