Ever since the introduction of Windows NT in the early 1990s Microsoft has long coveted the prestigious and lucrative data center server market. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, though, each time Microsoft and Intel improved on scalability and reliability, the burgeoning demands of the highest performance OLTP ERP systems and the mushrooming scale of the largest business intelligence databases stayed one step ahead of Wintel’s peak performance. Now, with the introduction of Intel’s new (Montecito) multi-core Itanium II processors Windows systems rival or even exceed the performance of the most scalable Unix/RISC based systems.
With this leap in scalability customers are now looking at the new Itanium II based servers as platforms for satisfying both the need for greater performance and size, as well as improved IT efficiency through server consolidation. Specifically, many organizations are looking to consolidate their previous sprawl of Microsoft SQL Server implementations on the highly reliable and scalable HP Integrity line of servers. This paper examines the economic justification for server consolidation of Microsoft SQL Server databases on HP Integrity servers through the financial analysis of two distinct customer environments. The financial analysis presented in this paper is based on the detailed technical assessment and recommendations of SQL Server technical consultants, Scalability Experts, www.scalabilityexperts.com.
Each case compares the investment in new hardware, software and services as well as on-going operational expenses for the consolidated HP Integrity solution with analogous costs for maintaining and growing the original server infrastructures. In addition, the study also examines an alternative approach for each case of consolidating on the latest HP ProLiant x86 based servers. The results of these cases consistently revealed significant savings in moving to the HP Integrity servers, with an average TCO savings of 47.2% for the HP Integrity solutions over the current environments over a three year analysis period. Similarly, the HP Integrity solutions averaged a 33% lower TCO over the alternative x86 based HP ProLiant proposals.
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