Having a scattered Microsoft SQL Server database platform is cumbersome to maintain, as you continue to accumulate waste capacity to your database servers. Therefore, you should consider consolidating your platform to make it more manageable. Let us learn about Why is SQL Server Consolidation Better Than Having a Scattered Environment?
It is good to understand the numerous benefits of proper SQL Server consolidation. It is not only a question about gaining cost savings but also a question of practicality. Several things will make your data platform administration smoother and more straightforward.
1. There is less administration work in SQL Server, Windows, and hardware.
It is obvious that when reducing the number of physical hosts for example from 100 to 10, there is a whole lot less administration work and patching in the SQL Servers and in Windows. This is especially true when you have a High Availability (HA) solution because the downtimes are minimal. When there are lesser host machines to look after, it is a lot easier to manage the hardware.
2. It becomes easier to monitor the whole infrastructure.
This is a no brainer. Having a lot less physical and virtual servers to monitor means a lot less work on following the server level resource usage and baselines.
3. Significant savings in Windows and SQL Server licensing and hardware costs.
I have come across a software solution that will ease the consolidation planning dramatically. The automation behind it reduces the workload a lot making the planning process also faster. The intelligent machine learning algorithms and benchmark data in the software make the planning a lot more accurate than manual methods can offer. This software is called SQL Governor.
The team behind SQL Governor shares that so far their customers have achieved on average 44% costs savings in SQL Server licenses. This can translate to savings worth even millions if you have a bigger data platform environment.
The team SQL Governor explains that when your data platform is intelligently consolidated, the overall usage of CPU and RAM is optimized. There are less sleeping CPU cycles in the system and the overall RAM usage is in better control. Thus, there is a need for less hardware.
Also, with SQL Governor you can gain a better understanding of the storage capacity needs. When planning the consolidation of the data platform, the workload forecasts can be followed on an individual database, instance, and server level. This helps to understand the capacity used as a whole and makes it easier to select suitable storage for each use case.
4. You can gain savings in electricity and rack space.
In medium-sized to bigger data centers, you can achieve major savings in both electricity consumption and rack space by consolidating your servers. This is especially important when it comes to environmental thinking and the carbon footprint of your data center.
I have written about the SQL Governor solution in my previous blog article, in addition to the benefits that capacity planning can offer to SQL Server performance. You can also look into the consolidation guide team SQL Governor have put together to help you in your consolidation planning.
Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)
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