Reduce IT Spending While Still Upgrading to SQL Server 2008

With the economy taking a dive many IT managers are concerned over spending and not too sure if they should upgrade their database applications to SQL Server 2008.  The latest features and functionality included out-of-the-box with SQL Server 2008 will allow IT managers to save a tremendous amount of money and at the same time reduce management costs, hence it is worth the investment and you should upgrade to SQL Server 2008. 

 The features which will help reduce management costs and budget include: 

Consolidation

As organizations use ever increasing numbers of applications to manage business processes, provide new services, and gain an insight into business performance, the number of SQL Server systems and data storage servers that are required to support those applications has grown significantly. In many organizations, the hardware costs and the overhead of deploying and maintaining multiple SQL Server systems throughout the enterprise is a major financial and logistical burden.

At the same time, advances in hardware and software technologies mean that modern IT systems can handle significantly greater workloads than was previously possible. This has given rise to a movement towards consolidating SQL Server systems, databases and instances onto fewer physical servers, which results in better utilization of available hardware capacity. This reduces the costs associated with buying and maintaining servers, and enables more efficient and effective IT infrastructure management.

Reducing Costs with Virtualization

For complete isolation at the operating system level, SQL Server 2008 supports server virtualization. By using Microsoft Virtual Server you can install multiple virtual operating systems on one physical computer. When you use this approach with Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 with the Hyper-V role and SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, you can buy one Windows license and one SQL Server license per physical processor, regardless of how many virtual machines are installed on the physical server.

By consolidating your data services with virtualization, you achieve a good level of isolation between database solutions with different workloads, security requirements, manageability requirements, or compatibility requirements while minimizing the number of servers and licenses required and simplifying your network infrastructure.

Policy Based Management

Policy-Based Management enables the efficient management of multiple SQL Server instances from a single location. Easily create policies that control security, database options, object naming conventions, and other settings at a highly granular level. Policies can evaluate servers for compliance with a set of predefined conditions and prevent undesirable changes being made to servers.

Summary - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 allows an IT manager to reduce costs associated with Hardware, Software and Management.  An organization should most definitely upgrade to Microsoft's latest flagship product in order to reap the benefits and reduce costs.

So make the move and start your upgrade today!!!

Cheers,

 Ross Mistry, SQL Server MVP

Author - SQL Server 2008 Management & Administration and Windows Server 2008 Unleashed

• Reduce IT Spending While Still Upgrading to SQL Server 2008
• Ross Mistry
• SQL Server 2008 Management and Administration