In these economic tough times, corporations are looking for ways to control and tighten their spending. Have you been tasked with identifying ways to reduce your total cost of ownership for SQL Server? If so then maybe you should consider how consolidating your SQL Server environment might help reduce your long term SQL Server costs.
This paper talks about the reasons why you might want to consolidate. Some of the things that drive corporations into considering consolidation are: Lack of space in the data center, reducing cost and improving efficiency, standardizing and centralizing.
When you plan to consolidate, you need to appropriately select the applications/databases that you want to consolidate. This paper deals with how to choice the right candidates for consolidation. Knowing the candidate applications and databases, and their processing profile helps you correctly identify those databases that will work well together in a consolidated environment. Additionally you need to determine how you are going to consolidate. Do you collapse a number of databases running in multiple instances into a single instance, or do you take multiple single instance machines and create one big machine that runs multiple instances.
There are a number of features in SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2, as wells as Windows 2008 that can help with consolidation. You need to know what tools are available and how they can be used and leveraged to help you build, and manage your consolidate environment.
No matter what drives you to consider consolidation, reasonable choices need to be made in order for you to be successful. SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 offer the features you need to manage your consolidation effort. This white paper will help you better understand the things you need to know, and the tools that are available to guide your SQL Server consolidation effort.
