Demystifying Hardware - SQL Server 2012 Internals and Troubleshooting - page 48

in workload. This is particularly important if you have an Intel Nehalem or Westmere family pro-
cessor. The latest Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge family processors react to power state changes
much more quickly than Nehalem or Westmere did, which makes them much less sensitive to those
changes from a performance perspective.
Regardless of what processor you have, power management can have other negative effects on your
database server. One example is when you are using Fusion-io cards in your server. Some forms of
hardware management can affect the PCIe slots in the server, so Fusion-io specii cally recommends
that you disable power management settings in your main BIOS setup and in Windows. The easy
solution to all of this is to ensure that you are using the High Performance Windows Power Plan,
and that you disable the power management settings in your BIOS.
Finally, after ensuring that you have followed all the guidelines described thus far, you still are
not done. Depending on your RPO and RTO requirements, you should be planning and hopefully
implementing some sort of overall high-availability and disaster-recovery (HA/DR) strategy to
provide you with an even more robust system that will be able to handle as many different types
of issues and “disasters” as possible. This strategy could include technologies such as Windows
failover clustering, database mirroring, log shipping, transactional replication, and SQL Server 2012
AlwaysOn Availability Groups, along with an actual plan that outlines the policies and procedures
needed to successfully handle a disaster.
HARDWARE COMPARISON TOOLS
We are i rm proponents of using readily available benchmark tools and some common sense and
analysis as a means of comparing different hardware types and coni gurations. Rather than simply
guess about the relative and absolute performance of different systems, you can use the results of
standardized database benchmarks and specii c component benchmarks to more accurately evalu-
ate and compare different systems and components. This section discusses two such benchmark-
ing tools: the TPC-E OLTP benchmark and the Geekbench processor and memory performance
benchmark.
TPC-E Benchmark
The TPC Benchmark E (TPC-E) is an OLTP performance benchmark that was introduced in early
2007. TPC-E is a not a replacement for the old TPC-C benchmark, but rather a completely new
OLTP benchmark. Even though this newer benchmark has been available for over i ve years, there
are still no posted results for any RDBMS other than SQL Server. Fortunately, many results are
posted for SQL Server, which makes it a very useful benchmark when assessing SQL Server hard-
ware. At the time of writing, there are 54 published TPC-E results, using SQL Server 2005, 2008,
2008 R2, and SQL Server 2012. This gives you many different systems and coni gurations from
which to choose as you look for a system resembling one that you want to evaluate.
The TPC-E benchmark is an OLTP, database-centric workload that is meant to reduce the cost
and complexity of running the benchmark compared to the older TPC-C benchmark. Unlike
TPC-C, the storage media for TPC-E must be fault tolerant (which means no RAID 0 arrays).
Overall, the TPC-E benchmark is designed to have reduced I/O requirements compared to the old