Your SQL Servers are integral to your organisation. If their performance dips, so does your business performance. If you fail to implement effective SQL Server consolidation strategies across your infrastructure, you could waste millions in unnecessary expenditure.
But how do you know if your SQL Server system is fully optimised to run at peak performance and minimal cost to your business?
Things can quickly get complicated for your SQL Server network. All too often, a new project starts with a new application. And so, a new server gets added to your infrastructure. However, as your business and its applications grow, so does your number of SQL Servers.
As a result, you could face some major repercussions in the form of performance issues, unnecessary expenditure and costly service outages as your environment grows in size and complexity.
If you want to avoid such issues, we’d recommend you regularly assess your infrastructure, to help you monitor its performance and identify areas of cost savings, using a range of SQL Server consolidation tactics.
Such tactics can have a significant impact on your business. Let’s look at some leading SQL Server consolidation strategies in more detail now.
Licensing costs
Are your servers over- or under-utilised? What do your SQL instances need in terms of resources? What edition do your SQL instances need to run effectively and efficiently?
A SQL Server study of Consolidation and Optimisation of Licensing costs can help you answer all these questions.
What’s more, these licenses are often an area of great (and unnecessary) expenditure for many businesses. For example, we recently identified savings of more than one million Euros for one of our clients by reducing their SQL licensing costs.
When assessing your SQL Server licensing costs, we take a proactive approach where we complete:
- An audit of your SQL estate to consolidate
- A full study of consolidation and optimisation of SQL licensing costs
- A SQL Server consolidation roadmap (on-premise or for cloud-based Azure)
By following our SQL Server consolidation roadmap for your environment, you can improve your performance and save on your resources and licensing costs.
Further SQL Server consolidation
It’s not just licensing costs that you need to be aware of. Here are some additional factors your DBA should assess and monitor to help you optimise your environment:
#1 Top consuming queries
If you can find the most expensive queries on your SQL network, this could boost your server’s performance. Once you've identified those resource-heavy queries, you can optimise them to reduce the load on your memory usage and server cycles.
#2 Index fragmentation
Proper indexing helps you search the database faster and more efficiently. But when data is modified, removed or deleted, index pages get split, the indexed content gets distributed and your database becomes fragmented. This will result in performance degradation.
#3 Database size and bottlenecks
As your database size grows, you need to match this growth by providing your SQL servers with more memory and CPU. As such, you need to monitor the size of your database to ensure that your hard-disks don't run out of space. At the same time, you also need to monitor potential bottlenecks across your memory, disks, CPU and your wider network.
In conclusion
There are a number of ways you can assess and monitor your SQL Servers, depending on your environment. In particular, by streamlining your licensing costs, you could achieve massive cost savings for your business.
However, it’s easy to overlook sometimes small flags that could have a big impact on your bottom line and service.
That’s where a SQL Server consolidation and optimisation of licensing costs study could help you identify these areas of improvement, ensuring you run your systems at peak performance and minimal cost.
At QUBARK, we provide a thorough SQL Server study of Consolidation and Optimisation of Licensing costs service. Please click here to find out more.
