Module 2

Planning SQL Server Business

Intelligence Infrastructure
Module Overview

• Considerations for BI Infrastructure

• Planning Data Warehouse Hardware
Lesson 1: Considerations for BI Infrastructure

• Infrastructure Planning in a BI Project

• System Sizing Considerations
• BI Workloads
• Typical Server Topologies for a BI Solution
• Scaling Out a BI Solution
• Planning for High Availability
Infrastructure Planning in a BI Project

Business Requirements

Technical
Data
Architecture Reporting
Warehouse
and and Analysis
and ETL
Infrastructure Design
Design
Design

Monitoring and Optimizing

Operations and Maintenance

System Sizing Considerations

Data Volume Analysis/Report Complexity

Number of Users Availability Requirements

 BI Workloads

ETL
• Control flow tasks
Data Models • Data query and insert
Network data transfer
• Processing •
• Aggregation storage • In-memory data pipeline
• Multidimensional on disk • SSIS Catalog or MSDB I/O
• Tabular in memory
• Query execution

DW
Operations and
Maintenance
• OS activity
Reporting •
•
Logging
SQL Server Agent Jobs
• Client requests • SSIS packages
• Data source queries • Indexes
• Report rendering • Backups
• Caching
• Snapshot execution
• Subscription processing
• Report Server Catalog I/O
Typical Server Topologies for a BI Solution

DW

Single Server Architecture Distributed Architecture

Few Number of Servers Many

Hardware costs
Software license costs
Configuration complexity
Scalability & Performance
Flexibility
Scaling Out a BI Solution

Data Warehouse Analysis Services

Integration Services Reporting Services

Planning for High Availability

Data Warehouse Analysis Services

• AlwaysOn Failover Cluster • AlwaysOn Failover Cluster
• RAID Storage

Reporting Services
• NLB Report Servers
Integration Services
• AlwaysOn Availability Group
• AlwaysOn Availability Group
Or
• AlwaysOn Failover Cluster
Lesson 2: Planning Data Warehouse Hardware

• Microsoft Data Warehouse Fast Track Reference

Architectures
• Core-Balanced System Architecture
• Demonstration: Calculating Maximum
Consumption Rate
• Determining Processor and Memory Requirements
• Determining Storage Requirements
• Considerations for Storage Hardware
Microsoft Data Warehouse Fast Track Reference
Architectures

• Pre-tested and approved

hardware specifications and
guidance
• Available from multiple
hardware vendors in
partnership with Microsoft
• Support for a range of data
warehouse sizes
Core-Balanced System Architecture

• Core balanced design

• No one component is bottleneck in the system
• Test using tools such as Diskspd
• Calculate maximum consumption rate (MCR) as a
starting point for hardware planning
Demonstration: Calculating Maximum
Consumption Rate

In this demonstration, you will see how to:

• Create tables for benchmark queries
• Execute a query to retrieve I/O statistics
• Calculate MCR from the I/O statistics
Determining Processor and Memory
Requirements

Estimating CPU Requirements:

• Determine core MCR
• Apply formula to estimate required
number of cores:
((Average query size in MB/ MCR) x Concurrent users) / Target response time

• Spread cores across CPUs based on the

number of storage arrays

Estimating RAM Requirements:

• Use a minimum of 4 GB per core
(or 64 - 128 GB per socket)
• Target 20% of data volume
Determining Storage Requirements
Data Warehouse
• Determine initial data volume
• Number of fact table rows x row size
• Use 100 bytes per row as an estimate if unknown
• Add 30-40% for dimensions and indexes
• Project data growth
• Number of new fact rows per month
• Factor in compression
• Typically 3:1
Other storage considerations
• Configuration databases
• Log files
• TempDB
• Staging tables
• Backups
• Analysis Services models
Considerations for Storage Hardware

• Use more smaller disks instead of fewer larger disks

• Use the fastest disks you can afford
• Consider solid state disks―especially for random I/O

• Use RAID 10, or minimally RAID 5

• Consider a dedicated storage area network for
manageability and extensibility
• Balance I/O across enclosures, storage processors, and
disk groups
Lab: Planning SQL Server Business Intelligence
Infrastructure

• Exercise 1: Planning Server Topology

• Exercise 2: Planning Data Warehouse Hardware

Logon Information
Start 20467D-MIA-DC and 20467D-MIA-SQL, and
then log on to 20467D-MIA-SQL as
ADVENTUREWORKS\Student with the password
Pa$$w0rd.
Estimated Time: 60 Minutes.
Lab Scenario

You are planning a BI solution for Adventure

Works Cycles, and have been asked to specify the
hardware required for the solution. You have
interviewed business stakeholders in order to
understand the business requirements that the
solution must support, and now you must design
a SQL Server-based solution that provides the
right balance of functionality, performance, and
cost.
At this time, you have been informed that you
should not consider using SharePoint Server in
your planned solution.
Lab Review

• Review BI Topology.vsdx in the

D:\Labfiles\Lab02\Solution folder. How do the
various suggested topologies (on multiple pages
named A to F) compare to the topology you
designed in the lab?
• Review DW Hardware Spec.xlsx in the
D:\Labfiles\Lab02\Solution folder. How does the
hardware specification in this workbook compare
to the specification you created in the lab?
Module Review and Takeaways

• Review Question(s)