SQL Server Consolidation
Whether your business is seeking to reduce it's carbon footprint, minimise licensing costs or trying to regain control over its SQL Server sprawl, UniverSQL's SQL Server Consolidation Service is one of the best ways for your business to quantifyably reduce its IT maintenance overheads.
UniverSQL adopts a phased approach to SQL Server consolidation. Tthe following breakdown of tasks are undertaken in establishing what consolidation options are available to your business;
Business Case
Our initial consultation is to ascertain the business requirements underlying the motivation to engage in a SQL Server consolidation project. This phase serves to collate a requirements document detailing the current SQL Server environment and various goals for the consolidation project.
Detailed SQL Server Discovery
The discovery phase of the SQL Consolidation project is the comprehensive analysis of the following key contributors to effective SQL Server consolidation;
- Current SQL Servers within the environment
- Review of Shared Storage systems available for Consolidation
- Review current backup solution and consolidation impact upon this
- Review of SQL Server version within the environment
- SQL Server Collation Compatibility
- OLAP vs OLTP based databases
- Security requirements / models
- Facilities Management Requirements
- Timezones for geographically dispersed environments
- Review of licensing implications
This phase of the consolidation project involves workshops with key technical and business personnel to ensure all facets of the consolidation project are achieved, and produces are detailed report containing recommendations and an overview of the consolidation project moving forward into implementation, testing and support.
Design Effort (Clusters, Virtual Machines etc)
With the completion of the discovery phase, the project moves onto solutions design. All the above key factors are collated and analysed to produce a SQL Server consolidation solution as close to, or in accordance with the initial business case.
Solution Implementation
We build it!
Migration and Testing
Continguent upon the complexities surrounding the SQL Server consolidation, the database migration(s) may take place in a single big-bang approach or staged via a number of coordinated outage windows. A cycle of testing would follow each migration to ensure that the correct functionality was also carried across and to identify any potential issues before too many systems are affected.
Support of Consolidation Solutions
Persuant to the consolidation implementation, database migration and user testing, UniverSQL also offers ongoing SQL Server support packages to ensure your solution remains operational and performing optimally. For more information, please see our page on SQL Server support services.
SQL Server 2008 Consolidation
Consolidating your SQL Server environments to SQL Server 2008 also provides the following benefits;
- Centralize security auditing
- Policy-Based Management ensures policy compliance consistently across the enterprise
- Control workload resource prioritization with Resource Governor
- Built-in data compression and backup compression
- Consolidate data services monitoring with Performance Studio
Consolidation Utilities
SQL Server Discovery Wizard
Quest.com SQL Server Discovery Utility
SQLRecon 1.0 (requires NET Framework 2.0)