Microsoft® SQL Server® Technical Article
Writer: Anthony Steven, CM Group Ltd
Published: July 2011
Applies to: SQL Server 2008 R2
Summary: This document examines how the HP Enterprise
Database Consolidation (DBC) Appliance can improve database management, reverse SQL Server sprawl, increase business agility, and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).

This document is provided “as-is.” Information and views expressed in this document, including URLs and other Internet website references, may change without notice. You bear the risk of using it.
Some examples depicted herein are provided for illustration only and are fictitious. No real association or connection is intended or should be inferred.
This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any
Microsoft product. You may copy and use this document for your internal, reference purposes.
© 2011 Microsoft. All rights reserved.

Executive Summary .............................................................................................................. 1
Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 2
Industry Trends ..................................................................................................................... 2
Drivers for DBC by Using Virtualization ............................................................................. 4
DBC Case Study ................................................................................................................... 6
Microsoft IT ....................................................................................................................... 6
Process for Consolidating Databases ................................................................................... 8
Self-Build ........................................................................................................................... 8
Reference Architecture .................................................................................................... 10
HP Enterprise DBC Appliance ......................................................................................... 11
Database Appliance Scenarios ........................................................................................... 12
Wide World Importers ...................................................................................................... 15
Using Physical Servers ................................................................................................ 16
Implementing a DBC Appliance at World Wide Importers ............................................ 17
The Phone Company ....................................................................................................... 20
Comparing DBC Appliances................................................................................................ 21
Total Cost of Ownership .................................................................................................. 22
Performance with Database Loads .................................................................................. 23
The HP Enterprise DBC Appliance Value Proposition ......................................................... 23
Implementing the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance ................................................................. 24
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 25
Resources ........................................................................................................................... 25

The success of databases as a business tool has resulted in the phenomenon of database or SQL Server sprawl, where organizations often have hundreds or even thousands of underused physical servers running single database instances throughout the company.
However, with continual pressure to reduce IT spending, any investment in IT must show exceptional value. DBC is therefore an area that can show the levels of return that modern
IT projects must demonstrate.
Drivers for DBC include:

Simplifying infrastructure

Reducing risk

Minimizing staffing costs

Enhancing sustainable IT

Increasing IT responsiveness

Maximizing business agility

Implementing chargeback control

Streamlining high availability and disaster recovery.
This paper proposes that the most cost-effective approach to meeting these requirements is to replace instances of databases on physical servers with virtual servers running within the purpose-built HP Enterprise DBC Appliance.
This paper looks at two examples of the TCO of running multiple instances of SQL Server on physical servers and compares these costs with those of an equivalent number of virtual servers in the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance. Table 1 shows typical cost saving percentages from implementing the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance.
*
Factor
Number of databases to consolidate
Consolidation ratio
Number of HP Enterprise DBC
Appliances required
Reduction in power costs
Reduction in cooling costs
Example 1
200
200:1
1
89%
95%
Example 2
400
140:1
3
86%
93%
* Throughout this paper, the asterisk indicates that figures are calculated from the equipment specifications by using a custom analysis spreadsheet that Microsoft developed. Results within your own organization may vary from the figures shown.
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Reduction in floor space costs 88%
Reduction in administration costs 75%
Overall reduction in TCO over five years
(includes hardware and software acquisition costs)
36%
84%
57%
9%
Table 1: Representative Cost Savings Obtained by Using the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance
Finally, this paper looks at the differences in costs between the HP Enterprise DBC
Appliance and the EMC, VMware, and Cisco Vblock0 appliance. The analysis shows that the
HP Enterprise DBC Appliance is not only better suited to database workloads but is an estimated 13 percent cheaper to acquire and operate over one year than the Vblock0 equipment.
1
Databases are an inescapable part of modern commercial life, but organizations find it increasingly difficult to manage these databases effectively. This difficulty results in greater management costs, underused servers, increased power and cooling requirements, and reduced security.
DBC enables organizations to bring those databases into one fully managed environment.
However, this approach also brings considerable risks that are endemic in any IT project. A
DBC appliance can significantly reduce those risks by ensuring that the hardware and software within the appliance have been designed, developed, and integrated with the expressed aim of providing a platform for managing databases.
This white paper examines the current trend for DBC, identifies the benefits and challenges of this approach, and reviews alternate strategies for regaining control over the databases within your organization. These alternate strategies for DBC include in-house or consultantled design and self-build, following prescriptive architectural guidance, or purchase of a prebuilt appliance from those currently on the market.
This paper proposes the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance, optimized for SQL Server 2008 R2, as the most cost-effective route to DBC and management. This approach enables organizations to control database sprawl, significantly reduce operating costs, and manage and account for the costs of those database assets. It also ensures that they can maintain a high level of hardware usage but reduce their resource requirements.
IT departments must continually strive to work more efficiently and deliver increasing business value by responding to the latest economic, environmental, and organizational factors. The current downturn in the economy has resulted in what is now perceived as a permanent reduction in IT spending.
2 The result of less financial leverage in global markets
1 Figures obtained from public sources together with cost estimates where costs are not yet published.
2
Ian Davis .
“The new normal
.
” McKinsey Quarterly
, Mar ch 2009 .
Page 2

will be that organizations that can boost equity returns through the tried and tested route of increasing productivity are the ones that will flourish.
Environmental factors are also a major consideration. With both the media and the public focusing on climate change and environmental sustainability, organizations want to boost their environmental credentials and avail themselves of the cost-reduction opportunities that sensible environmental policies can bring. The often-quoted 2007 report 3 by the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to Congress estimated that by 2011, consumption by servers and data centers would reach 100 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), which would result in an annual electricity cost of $7.4 billion.
The IT industry itself is responding with coordinated attempts to improve awareness of environmental issues, with organizations such as the EPA Energy Star program publishing recommendations for measuring and reporting overall power usage effectiveness (PUE) as a key measure of data center efficiency.
4 Since the EPA report, although organizations are becoming more efficient in using power, the move to cloud-based environments has increased the overall demand for electricity at data centers.
Hence, increasing numbers of organizations are striving for greater efficiency at lower costs and are looking to IT to help provide those savings. Tools are now available that enable organizations to quantify the financial value to the overall company which result from improved energy efficiency.
5 Consequently, when organizations are looking to cut the costs of IT infrastructure, they increasingly turn to virtualization as a mechanism for achieving quantifiable expenditure reductions and therefore decreasing the TCO of those infrastructure assets.
In an example of how virtualization can deliver these cost savings, 6 East Lothian Council
— one of 32 unitary council areas in Scotland in the United Kingdom (U.K.)
— used Windows
Server ® 2008 R2 Hyper-V as the platform of choice for its virtualization migration project.
According to Rod Adam, IT Team Leader, Server Management Team, East Lothian Council, this environment “will migrate most applications to four new servers, which will each run approximately 12 virtual machines. The virtualized capacity is 90 percent less expensive to acquire than the physical machines that they replace.
” This consolidation enabled the c ouncil to avoid a £150,000 computer room upgrade, saving it £80,000 after the virtualization infrastructure purchase.
What is even more important is that server virtualization is now considered a mainstream technology in IT and it is a key mechanism for delivering cost savings from server http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Strategy/Strategic_Thinking/The_new_normal_2326
3 US Environmental Protection Agency : Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Efficiency .
Public Law, August 2, 2007, 109-431. http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/downloads/EPA_Datacenter_Report_Congr ess_Final1.pdf
4 Energy Star : Recommendations for Measuring and Reporting Overall Data Center Efficiency . July
15, 2010. http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/downloads/Data_Center_Metrics_Task_For ce_Recommendations.pdf
5 Energy Star : Financial Value Calculator . http://www.energystar.gov/ia/business/financial_value_calculator.xls
6 Microsoft : East Lothian Council Case Study . October 23, 2009. http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000005578
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consolidation and rapid provisioning of new servers. Virtualization delivers cost savings with all budget types and operation levels, including servers, storage, data centers, power and cooling, software, test and development, and operations.
Databases are one key area where the benefits of consolidation are particularly notable, so it is to be expected that organizations are increasingly looking at the virtualization approach for consolidating databases. Consolidation through database virtualization provides considerable cost savings through increased server usage, simplification of data center infrastructure, and reductions in operational costs. Many of the techniques that have been successfully applied in virtualizing more general IT environments can be applied in database environments.
However, databases are characterized by a large memory footprint, high physical I/O, high transaction throughput, a deterministic workload, and a rigorous high availability requirement. Therefore, there are several key issues that organizations must tackle when they implement databases in a virtualized environment. Before investigating these challenges of DBC, it is helpful to look at the business drivers to which organizations must increasingly respond.
Databases are very useful for businesses and increasingly easy to create, so departments, groups, teams, and individuals tend to commission databases
— often without the involvement or knowledge of the IT department. This inevitable proliferation of databases creates what is known as database or SQL Server sprawl. DBC seeks to reverse SQL
Server sprawl and return these unmanaged data stores to the management umbrella of the
IT department.
Industry studies 7 indicate that DBC through virtualization can bring the following benefits:

Infrastructure simplification . In the worst cases, SQL Server sprawl results in multiple underused servers spread all over an enterprise. Even in organizations that manage to keep IT assets within a central location or data center, departments will have been requesting physical servers on which to host database instances.
Consolidating databases through virtualization will reduce the number of physical database servers, with 120 to 200 database instances being hosted on one HP
Enterprise DBC Appliance. After consolidation, the new physical servers will run at higher usage levels, and the original physical assets can be decommissioned and removed from the network.

Reduced risk . Hardware consolidation, where a single physical server is consolidated as one virtual machine, is inherently less risky than software consolidation, where multiple database instances run on one physical computer. This reduction in risk results from the fact that migrating one physical server to one virtual machine does not change the database structure or instance configuration in any way.
7 Gartner : Consolidation through Database Virtualization . April 18, 2011. http://my.gartner.com/resources/210000/210092/consolidation_through_databa_210092.pdf (note that
Membership of Partner is required to view this resource)
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
Reduced staffing costs . Staffing costs are a major part of any organization’s IT budget, particularly when you consider that employees typically cost a company in the region of twice their salary when pension contributions, social security payments, health care benefits, and other rewards are taken into account. Typically, consolidating 120 physical servers onto one HP Enterprise DBC Appliance can free up three IT administrators for other maintenance tasks (assuming one administrator for every 30 servers).

Sustainable IT . DBC is an immediate way of demonstrating commitment to a sustainable IT agenda. Calculations of power usage indicate that consolidating 400
SQL Server instances onto three HP Enterprise DBC Appliances reduces energy costs by 86 percent and cut cooling costs by up to 93 percent.
8

IT responsiveness . With multiple database instances running on virtual machines in a multiple-host physical environment, IT departments can dynamically respond to changing conditions and database loads by using the live migration feature to move virtual machines from one physical host to another. By using integrated system management and monitoring tools, IT departments can ensure that availability and performance service level agreements (SLAs) are met.

Business agility . DBC does not just cut costs; it can also make organizations more agile and responsive. Virtual machine
– based provisioning of database instances means that business units can request the resources to create a database and have that instance approved, built, and operational that same day.

Chargeback control . Chargeback control enables IT departments to proportion costs to internal departments and groups accurately. With multiple physical servers, accurate cost allocation is impossible; HP Enterprise DBC Appliances with integral management software ensure that costs charged to departments are accurate and billed in a timely fashion.

High availability and disaster recovery . The structure and functionality of databases means that high availability and disaster recovery are essential requirements to ensure that data is adequately protected. Database instances on single physical servers rarely have any form of high availability or disaster recovery implemented, and those that do may be using a fully redundant passive node that is not contributing to the workload. In a consolidated, virtualized environment, you have additional high availability and disaster recovery options that do not tie up a second physical server for every virtual machine.
Overall, these benefits can translate into reduced TCO for your organization. However, according to the Gartner report Virtualization: The Real Benefits and TCO Offsets , to achieve those TCO savings, you must also: 9

Use standardization to minimize administrative overhead.

Implement virtual machine templates.

Manage the consolidation environment effectively.

Control virtual server sprawl.

Choose the right licensing arrangements.
8 Microsoft HP Enterprise DBC Appliance TCO Calculator.
9 Gartner : Virtualization: The Real Benefits and TCO Offsets . http://www.gartner.com/it/content/1322300/1322320/april_7_virtualization_real_benefits_pdawson.pdf
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
Minimize governance issues.
The following section looks at a prime example of an organization that has taken this path.
Three years ago, Microsoft IT realized that it had approximately 100,000 databases on 5,000 instances of SQL Server, so a major project was launched to consolidate these databases into a virtual environment.
10 This process has replaced physical server instances with virtual machines, with the aim of realizing a number of business benefits:

Reducing operating and capital expenses . New hardware has far greater computing power than hardware that is nearing the end of its life. Newer hardware generally requires less power and cooling.

Increasing environmental sustainability . Lower power and cooling requirements are the primary areas where this DBC process tackles environmental concerns, but an overall reduction in data center space will also contribute over the long term.

Providing business continuity, scalability, and availability . Microsoft IT wanted to find opportunities to standardize and to improve best practices in these areas.

Providing a standardized server build library . New technologies such as Hyper-V have opened new opportunities for standardization. The Microsoft SQL Server Utility is designed to eliminate or streamline many of the manual steps that are needed to build an application environment. This outcome can be achieved by establishing
Hyper-V guests that are built with standard software configuration, including the operating system, SQL Server, tools, and approved configurations that can be provided for use in different phases of the software development life cycle.
Microsoft’s objective was to deploy a SQL Server Utility service that would reduce operating and capital expenses through consolidation and multi-tenancy. The SQL Server consolidation initiative was based on the already successful shared service models of
Storage Utility, Compute Utility, and File Server Utility. Each of these utilities has contributed to standardization of the Microsoft IT infrastructure, and each provides a more predictable and reliable platform for other applications and services.
The Microsoft experience was that not all SQL Server instances were good candidates for consolidation. Hence, the SQL Server Utility offerings must cover different tenant needs in different ways, as Figure 1 shows.
10 Mark Photo: Green IT in Practice: SQL Server Consolidation in Microsoft IT, The Architecture
Journal http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/dd393309.aspx
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Figure 1: Levels of DBC Suitability
Hyper-V database hosting is suitable for tenants who need up to four processors and named instances. Hence, this solution was initially developed with the most typical online transaction processing (OLTP) databases in mind. Multi-tenancy scenarios were also supported for those customers who only want a single database. Microsoft expects that consolidation will be appropriate for thousands of instances and that multi-tenancy will be appropriate for hundreds of databases.
Right-sizing teams and capacity management teams have greater agility when it comes to sizing up or down. If a tenant requests a medium-sized two-processor guest with 4 gigabytes
(GB) of memory, but after deployment, learns that he or she underestimated the resource requirements, it is a simple matter to add memory and processors to the guest, even if it means relocating the guest to a host with available resources.
This flexibility to reconfigure and relocate Hyper-V guests means that IT teams no longer have to purchase unnecessary hardware resources, which will result more effective use of data center resources. However, a shared or dedicated server will be used for those who require additional processor or memory resources. As Hyper-V, hardware, and other technologies evolve, it is expected that more tenant needs will be met by using Hyper-V.
Microsoft is still evaluating the outcome of the migration project, but overall, annual operating costs for the SQL Server Utility are expected to be $11 million a year lower than previously.
Even more dramatic is the reduction in space and energy consumption. A typical end-of-life
SQL Server host in the Microsoft data center occupies 6.8 rack units. Servers that the
Compute Utility team provide occupy less than one rack unit and provide enough computing power to host five or six instances of SQL Server. This comes to a saving of over 33,000 rack units or about 700 racks.
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On average, end-of-life servers use 369 volt amps, and new servers use 313 volt amps and can run at slightly higher temperatures. Similar power requirements exist for cooling. This means that there will be a dramatic reduction in power requirements
— over 3 million volt amps
— and eventually, there may be opportunities to modify data center cooling requirements to further reduce power consumption.
Overall, the Microsoft IT SQL Server Utility project is making a substantial impact on environmental sustainability and achieving many other virtualization and consolidation benefits. However, the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance has the potential for even greater returns.
Now that you have reviewed the business case for DBC and looked at a case study where an organization has shown quantifiable benefits from implementing this type of project, you can move on to review the different approaches to consolidating databases.
Microsoft offers three ways of implementing a DBC solution. Each solution has certain advantages and disadvantages that you should consider before you commit to that particular approach.
Figure 2 summarizes these three routes.
Slowest time to market
Highest risk
Lower performance
Not private cloud
– ready
Highest customization
Fastest time to market
Lowest risk
Highest performance
Private cloud
– ready
Less customization
Self-Build
Hyper-V Cloud
Reference
Architecture
HP DBC Appliance
Figure 2: Routes to DBC
The first approach is to use guidance provided by Microsoft or a Microsoft Partner (or by your selected virtualization vendor) on portals such as TechNet and MSDN ® , in addition to
Microsoft Learning training and consultancy services from Microsoft and its partners, to build
Page 8

a bespoke private cloud solution. This approach enables the greatest customization but requires extensive IT skills and typically takes longest to implement.
To implement a self-build project, you would typically need to implement a process similar to the following:
1. Assess the workload . You must start by knowing what databases are present in your environment and the hardware on which they are running. You will also need to classify these databases according to level of business criticality, disaster recovery and high availability requirements, size, and workload.
2. Define the architecture . With this knowledge of your own environment, you can move on to define the architecture that you will use to replicate this environment by using virtualization technologies. This stage will involve making decisions on the best virtualization platform, sizing your consolidation servers to handle the expected loads, selecting the hardware, and choosing the right combination of software.
3. Evaluate options . When you design a DBC appliance yourself, the possible combinations of hardware and software will be extensive. You will be faced with a myriad of processor, memory, hard disk drive, and networking combinations, each of which must then be evaluated against the software combinations that you plan to use. Even if you implement separate single-vendor supply strategies for your hardware and your software, you are not guaranteed full compatibility between the hardware and the software (or even between the software itself).
4. Acquire the hardware and software . The acquisition process itself can be a complex undertaking. Few vendors have the inventory to deliver all of the components for a DBC appliance, so orders are likely to be split between different suppliers. Lead times and delivery problems will affect the project timeline and add to the overall risk.
5. Install the components . After you have acquired all of the components, you must build and commission your solution. If you have performed the architectural planning correctly, this phase should proceed relatively smoothly. However, complex projects of this nature rarely proceed entirely to plan, and you must allow for unexpected issues in the build process.
6. Load data . With your proof of concept (POC) solution created, you can now load some trial data onto the appliance to check that the migration process works as planned and to provide you with baseline operating information as part of the POC phase.
7. Operate as POC . Before you can deploy your newly build DBC appliance into your operational environment, you must run it as a POC using the trial data that you migrated in the previous step. The POC ensures that the appliance will run as expected and deliver the calculated results. Any aberration from the required outcome can then be rectified before commissioning the appliance with live loads.
8. Balance the hardware and software . During the POC phase, you will be able to balance and tune the hardware and software to ensure maximum performance.
Features such as load balancing switches and live migration of running virtual machines can be checked and confirmed as operating correctly. You must test high availability and disaster recovery features to ensure that you can achieve the required failover protection and restore times.
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9. Integrate into the live environment . Assuming that the POC phase completes successfully, you can now look to integrate the DBC appliance into your live environment. After deployment, you will probably look to migrate a couple of low importance databases onto the appliance.
10. Monitor and troubleshoot . With a few lower importance databases migrated and running on the appliance, you can then monitor their operation to ensure that the design requirements are being met. Assuming that everything functions according to plan, you can now start the process of migrating the remaining databases onto the appliance.
11. Plan migration . With a commissioned and functioning DBC appliance in place, you can now plan the migration of the mission-critical databases into the virtual environment. A phased approach ensures that you keep the risks of this migration to a minimum.
12. Consolidate database servers . From your migration plan, you can start the process of consolidating your databases from the original physical computers to the new virtual environment. Again, if you have performed the architectural planning correctly, this process should go relatively smoothly, with the source databases mapped to one of a number of standardized virtual machine templates that provide the required levels of virtual processors, memory, and hard disk drive space.
13. Manage the datacenter . With the databases migrated to the DBC appliance, you should be able to manage the virtual environment and realize the cost benefits from
DBC.
A typical project timescale for such an implementation would be in the region of 12 or more months from envisioning to final commissioning. On the positive side, this approach does give you the greatest flexibility in terms of choice of vendors, hardware and software specifications, and customization. However, as with any large IT project, there are areas of significant cost and risk that make the pure self-build approach less attractive and potentially more expensive than the up-front sticker price for the hardware and software. Even with careful cost control, unexpected incompatibilities can lead to significantly increased consultancy and internal IT management costs.
An approach that can help reduce some of the risks of the self-build solution and also save time in the deployment is to implement a reference architecture from a specific vendor. This approach ensures a consistent, proven design that is more likely to lead to a successful implementation and can be packaged and sold as a solution to customers.
HP Enterprise provides this guidance as the HP Database Consolidation Solution for
Microsoft SQL Server . This preconfigured reference architecture is optimized for Tier 2/3
SQL Server consolidation into a virtual environment. The solution web page is at: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/partners/microsoft-database-consolidationsolution.html. Other vendors provide similar guidance.
This guidance is designed to be used alongside stand-alone tools that assist with the process of DBC. These tools include:

Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit , at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977556.aspx.
Page
10


Microsoft Consolidation Planning Tool for SQL Server v1.0
, from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=eda8f544-c6eb-495f-
82a1-b6ae53b30f0a.

SQL Server Migration Tool , available from http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/product-info/migration.aspx.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor , available from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=f5a6c5e9-4cd9-
4e42-a21c-7291e7f0f852.
You can also use these tools with a self-build implementation.
Although this approach significantly reduces the risks involved with DBC, it still requires considerable planning and project management, together with the skills to build the solution.
The fast-track approach still requires you to carry out many of the phases that are inherent in the self-build approach.
The third option is to remove a large chunk of the architectural planning, the option evaluation, and the complexities of hardware and software acquisition by simply purchasing a DBC appliance. One of the key benefits of the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance is that it is a complete solution. It includes all of the hardware and software you will need
— preinstalled, configured, and ready to use. It also includes a single point of support for all aspects of the appliance.
The HP Enterprise DBC Appliance is supplied in a half-rack or a full rack configuration.
Multiple full racks can be chained to provide additional scaling. Figure 3 shows the full rack configuration.
Eight dual-processor blades, each with
256 GB of RAM and 2 x 300 GB of local hard disk drive storage
Four storage blocks, each with 27 terabytes of formatted storage on 99 spindles per block delivering 15,000 input/output operations per second
(IOPS) per block (60,000 IOPS per
Figure 3: Full configuration of the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance rack)
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11

With the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance, you have all the tools you will need to:

Prepare a consolidation and server migration initiative by discovering servers across your enterprise and creating an inventory of installed software and database server configurations. The MAP Toolkit provides an easy way to analyze your existing infrastructure and determine recommendations for migrating your existing servers.

Migrate physical servers to virtual machines. Microsoft System Center Virtual
Machine Manager includes physical to virtual (P2V) migration capabilities that make it easy to transfer a physical server, including its software and configuration, to a centrally managed virtual machine with minimal downtime.

Manage and operate your virtualized data center by creating virtual machine templates for rapid deployment, configuring virtual machine settings to make the best use of hardware resources, and monitoring the health of the overall data center and individual virtual machines to ensure optimal performance.
Together with these tools, the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance provides the following benefits:

Realize fast time to value . The HP Enterprise DBC Appliance provides the fastest possible way to deploy a fully operational virtualized private cloud infrastructure for database servers. By eliminating the time that customers require to design, tune, and test all of the hardware and software components, the appliance greatly reduces planning, setup, configuration, and deployment time, minimizing the costs and risks of implementation.

Gain full private cloud benefits . The HP Enterprise DBC Appliance comes with the hardware and software you need to migrate and manage your database servers and includes a copy of SQL Server to manage your private cloud solution.

Simplify operations . The HP Enterprise DBC Appliance provides tight integration across applications and infrastructure combined with an end-to-end integrated management and virtualization console. It also implements standards-based technologies that adapt easily for growth, so that the DBC Appliance creates a simple, centralized solution for provisioning, managing, monitoring, and optimizing a virtualized data center.

Reduce risks . As a fully engineered and tested system from HP Enterprise, the HP
Enterprise DBC Appliance removes many of the risks from hardware and software incompatibilities. The half or full appliance can be ordered as a single SKU that is delivered fully working, so you do not have to order, receive, unpack, and install multiple hardware and software packages.

Ensure best results . Compared with the self-build and reference architecture approaches, the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance provides the best combination of reliability, functionality, and cost from an appliance that was built with the express purpose of consolidating databases.
Now that you have reviewed the possible options for consolidating databases onto a DBC appliance, this next section reviews two hypothetical customer scenarios that represent typical consolidation candidates. These fictional companies are called Wide World Importers
(World Wide Importers) and The Phone Company (The Phone Company).
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12

Both of these companies face the same range of choices with respect to DBC. These choices are:

Continue with their current hardware and software environment.

Replace their current environment with newer servers running the latest operating systems and database versions.

Move to a DBC appliance, which can be: o Designed and created in-house. o Built in-house by using reference architectural guidance. o Delivered as a preconfigured appliance from a vendor.
Table 2 considers these options in greater detail.
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13

Option
Continue with the current environment
Replace the current servers with new hardware
Design and create own DBC solution and migrate to this environment
Simple one-toone replacement.
Phased execution.
Low cumulative risk.
New computers are cheaper to run.
Most customized
DBC appliance environment.
Build DBC solution based on reference architectural guidance and migrate
Migrate to dedicated DBC environment
Lower customization risk and reduced price compared with the HP
Enterprise DBC
Appliance.
Consolidates all database instances into one appliance.
Move to third-party virtualizationbased appliance
Migrate to HP
Enterprise DBC
Appliance
Advantages
No capital spend required on hardware or software.
No reconfiguration risk.
Provides some of the benefits of the HP DBC
Appliance
Provides the fastest route to value with the lowest project risk.
Disadvantages
Least secure.
Increasing maintenance cost.
No reduction in running costs.
Increased server underutilization without some form of consolidation and virtualization, which increases project complexity.
Highest project risk.
Increased number of unknowns. Potentially unexpected costs and longest implementation.
Noticeably higher risk than the HP Enterprise
DBC Appliance.
Comments
The do-nothing approach is proving increasingly untenable.
Chief Information
Officers (CIOs) must constantly strive to reduce costs, increase the return on IT assets, and still maintain operational security.
Organizations may see this approach as a viable option because it simply replaces what is currently in use.
However, because of the number of variables and assumptions that would have to be made with this approach, this paper does not consider this option any further.
The constraints of the IT departments in both of these companies means that the self-build option is not considered any further.
Again, due to the constraints on the IT departments in both companies, the reference architecture self-build option is not considered any further.
This approach requires database instance consolidation, which is more risky and challenging than virtual machine consolidation.
Third-party DBC devices may not be optimized for database virtualization.
Initial costs can be more than self-build approaches.
This option involves too many additional variables to be analyzed effectively in this paper.
This option is briefly examined at the end of this paper.
This paper considers this option in detail and compares it with the
“do-nothing” approach to demonstrate the level of savings available.
Table 2: Options for DBC
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14

Having looked at the options for consolidation and selected the two scenarios for closer analysis, this next section takes a deeper look at the current situation within each company.
For simplicity, it is assumed that each company has similar hardware and database types but in different ratios. Table 3 shows the typical hardware and database instance mixes for these two companies.
Database size
Small
Medium
Example computer type
HP ProLiant
DL360 G5 or earlier 1U server
HP ProLiant
DL380 G5 or earlier 2U server
Hardware specification
Single processor, dual core, 4 GB of RAM, 2 x 146 GB 10k hard disk drive RAID1 array, total available space 100 GB, dual network interface card (NIC), redundant fans and redundant power supplies
Database instances in World
Wide
Importers
134
Database instances in The
Phone
Company
220
124 Quad-core processor, 8 GB of
RAM, 6 x 146 GB 10k HDD as 1 x
RAID1 array (boot) and 1 x RAID5 array (data) plus hot spare, dual
NIC, redundant hot-plug fans and redundant hot-plug power supplies
50
Large HP DL580
ProLiant G5 or earlier 4U server
Dual quad-core processor, 16 GB of RAM, 14 x 72 GB 15k HDD as
RAID 0+1 array plus two hot spares, dual NIC, redundant hotplug fans and redundant power supplies
16 56
Total number of database instances
Achievable consolidation ratio
Table 3: Legacy Hardware Specifications
200
200:1
400
140:1
World Wide Importers has grown through a process of merging with and acquiring a number of previously autonomous business cooperatives and collectives. Operating throughout the continental United States, the distributed organization supplies small, independent shops in several different market sectors with unusual and hard-to-source goods from abroad. As cooperatives have merged with the organization, they have tended to bring their own databases, which were specifically engineered for supplying one particular market segment.
In consequence, World Wide Importers has a number of small databases on old hardware with smaller servers scattered around numerous locations. It also has a much smaller number of medium-sized servers and a small proportion of larger servers.
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Using Physical Servers
The company currently has 200 database instances, of which 67 percent are small instances, 25 percent are medium-sized instances, and the remaining 8 percent are large.
These percentages translate into 134 1U servers, 50 2U servers, and 16 4U servers.
11
Let us start by analyzing the costs of simply remaining with this environment.
Hardware Costs
If the company remains with its current physical servers, the hardware acquisition cost will be zero, because these computers are already fully depreciated. However, there is a hardware maintenance cost through a third-party provider, which typically costs 15 percent of the original purchase price of each computer and applies to the hard disk drives as well.
Table 4 lists those costs.
Server type Original price
1U DL360 $3,000
2U DL380
4U DL580
$6,000
$10,000
Table 4: Legacy Hardware Costs
Annual maintenance cost
$510
$1,050
$2,130
Multiplying these figures by the number of servers gives a total annual hardware maintenance cost of $154,920.
*
Software Costs
If World Wide Importers remains with its current environment, there would be no additional software costs. This assumption is on the basis that World Wide Importers is not paying any form of Software Assurance (SA) or Enterprise Agreement fees. Hence, software costs for this option are $0.
*
Energy Costs
The specified servers all consume energy and in turn create heat. This energy has to be provided and the heat removed, both of which incur costs. Table 5 shows the energy consumption and heat output figures for each server type, including the fitted hard drives.
Server type Power consumption
(Watts)
Heat output
British Thermal
Units (BTUs)
1U DL360 295 1007
2U DL380
4U DL580
526
1272
1792
4777
Table 5: Legacy Energy Requirements and Heat Output
These figures translate into a total power demand of 86,182 watts and a cooling requirement of 301 MBTU (1MBTU = 1,000 BTUs) for the calculated server numbers. Taking representative power costs of $0.10 per kWh and cooling costs of $25 for each MBTU for each month, World Wide Importers will be spending $75,547 each year on power and an additional $72,225 each year on cooling.
*
11 Based on starting assumptions for the Microsoft DBC Appliance spreadsheet.
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Space Usage Costs
Although you may not be directly charged for the space that you use, it is worth considering these costs, even if just from the opportunity cost perspective. For any organization, space costs money, so the cost of that space (and the consequent reduction in that expense) should be quantified.
To calculate these costs, consider the amount of racks that the physical servers will occupy.
The number and mix of server sizes at World Wide Importers will fill a total rack height of
298U. However, although a rack unit nominally holds 42U, you typically need to remove 4U from this total for switching and other ancillary equipment, so each rack holds 38U of servers. In the case of World Wide Importers, the 298U of servers fill a total of eight racks
(which is rounded up to the nearest full rack for floor space calculations).
Each rack occupies 11 square feet of space (allowing for the physical footprint and access to front and rear). Hence, the total number of servers at World Wide Importers occupies 88 square feet of data center floor space.
Taking a nominal charge of $25 for each square foot for each month, these eight racks of physical servers would cost the organization $26,400 a year.
*
Administration Costs
The cost of administering a physical server environment can also be significant. Assume that an IT administrator costs $100,000 a year to employ (when including salary, employment taxes, and pension and health plans), each administrator looks after 30 physical servers, and each administrator spends 50 percent of his or her time on server administration. World
Wide Importers must therefore employ the equivalent of four full-time administrators just to maintain these physical servers.
12 Hence, annual administrative costs are in the region of
$400,000.
*
Note : These costs are summarized and compared in Table 8 at the bottom of the next section.
Implementing a DBC Appliance at World Wide Importers
If World Wide Importers implements an HP Enterprise DBC Appliance, what level of cost reductions should it see? Let us consider the equivalent categories and new expenses that are not present in the original scenario.
The main variable you must manage at this point is the consolidation ratio. Extensive testing at HP indicates that consolidation ratios of between 120:1 and 200:1 are achievable, depending on the mix of databases to be consolidated. In the World Wide Importers scenario and database mix, the 200:1 ratio is achievable, which means that all of the physical servers can be replaced with a single full HP Enterprise DBC Appliance.
13
Hardware Costs
Hardware costs include the acquisition cost depreciated over the expected lifetime of the equipment (typically five years with the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance) and the maintenance costs. The software costs can also be depreciated over a similar lifetime.
12 Rounded up to the next whole number.
13 Indicative figures. Your consolidation ratios may be higher or lower than this figure.
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The hardware acquisition cost is $800,000 for a full rack and $400,000 for a half-rack.
14
In this scenario, this hardware cost of $800,000 would be depreciated over five years, resulting in a hardware acquisition cost of $160,000 each year. Based on prerelease information, the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance should be supplied with a comprehensive five-year hardware warranty, so there should not be any further hardware maintenance costs during this period.
Software Costs
The HP Enterprise DBC Appliance comes with a full management environment and the operating systems and database licenses to run the virtual machines. This software package consists of the following items:

Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter edition . This is the operating system that provides the ability to run unlimited instances of Windows Server 2008 R2 in the virtual machines. The OEM license price is included in the cost of the hardware.

SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition . This is the per-processor licensed version of SQL Server, so as long as each physical processor is licensed, you can run a copy of SQL Server in each virtual machine. The license price is $27,495 per processor and SA is 25 percent of the acquisition price for each year. Note that if you have existing transferable SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition per-processor licenses, you can attach these licenses to the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance and thus reduce costs. Without including any transferable licenses, the SQL Server licensing cost comes to $439,920 15 and the SA cost is $109,980.

Management suite . There is one SKU and price for the entire management suite, which provides you with all of the software that you require to manage the appliance.
This package includes SQL Server 2008 R2 and custom versions of the Microsoft
System Center family of products, including System Center Configuration Manager
2007 R3, System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, System Center Virtual
Machine Manager 2008 R2, and System Center Server Management Suite
Datacenter. The complete package price is $140,000 with SA of 25 percent for each year or $35,000.
16

HP Insight Control . HP Insight Control for overall management is included in the price of the hardware.
In this case, the only variable that can reduce the overall price you pay will be the number of unused transferable per-processor licenses for SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition that you have available. In this scenario, assume that World Wide Importers has 12 licenses available for transfer to the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance.
As with hardware, assume that the software is amortized across the expected lifetime of the device (five years). The software costs then become $49,996 each year in depreciation and
$144,980 in licensing maintenance, for a total cost of $194,976.
*
Energy Costs
Table 6 lists the main heat-generating components of the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance.
14 Based on preproduction information. Final list price may differ from this figure.
15 SQL Server 2008 R2 Pricing . http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx
16 Based on preproduction information. Final list price may differ from this figure.
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Item Energy
(W)
498
Number Total power
(W)
8 3,984 8 x HP ProLiant BL465 G7, 192 cores and 2048 GB of memory
HP P2000 storage (398 146 GB
15K disks, 57 terabytes raw capacity)
# D2700 JBODS
388
300
4
12
1,552
3,600
Total 9,136
Table 6: Power Requirements for the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance
In consequence, the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance consumes 80,086 kWh in a year.
Multiplying this figure by the electricity cost of $0.10 per kWh gives an electricity price of
$8,009.
*
Cooling Costs
Table 7 shows the equivalent figures for cooling costs for the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance.
Item Heat
(BTU)
1697 8 x HP ProLiant BL465 G7, 192 cores and 2048 GB of memory
HP P2000 storage (398 146 GB
15K SFF disks, 57 terabytes raw capacity)
# D2700 JBODS
405.5
80.3
Total
Number
8
4
12
Table 7: Cooling Costs for the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance
Total heat
(MBTU)
13.58
1.62
0.96
16.16
Taking the representative figure of $20 for each MBTU for each month leads to an annual cooling cost of $3,879.
*
Space Usage Costs
With 200 databases to consolidate and an achievable 200:1 consolidation ratio, World Wide
Importers can host all of its current physical database instances on a single full rack HP
Enterprise DBC Appliance. As with the previous space calculation, this single rack requires
11 square feet, which at the representative cost of $25 for each square foot for each month comes to $3,300 a year.*
Administration Costs
This paper assumes that each HP Enterprise DBC Appliance requires a dedicated full-time administrator who has no other responsibilities, which in the case of World Wide Importers will result in an overall administrative cost of $100,000 each year for the single HP
Enterprise DBC Appliance.*
Total Annual Expenses
Table 8 collates and summarizes the changes in total annual costs for the physical server environment compared with the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance.
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Item Physical servers
HP
Enterprise
DBC
Appliance
$160,000
Difference Percentage reduction
Hardware
(depreciation)
Hardware
(maintenance)
Software
(amortization)
Software
(maintenance)
Power
Cooling
$0
$154,920
$0
$0
$0
$49,996
$144,980
-$160,000 N/A
$154,920
-$49,996
100%
N/A
-$144,980 N/A
$75,547
$72,225
$8,009
$3,879
$67,539
$68,346
89%
95%
Floor space
Administration
$26,400 $3,300 $23,100 88%
$400,000 $100,000 $300,000 75%
Total $729,092 $470,164
Table 8: Cost Summary for the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance
$258,929 36%
Even when taking into account the capital costs of acquisition depreciated over five years, the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance is 36 percent cheaper than remaining with the physical environment.
*
The second scenario involves another fictional organization, The Phone Company, which is a UK-based regional telecommunications supplier that licenses and bundles specific services from major telecommunications companies and sells these packages into niche markets, such as houses without reliable high-speed Internet connections. The company has expanded rapidly since it was founded seven years ago; this expansion has resulted in considerable proliferation of application databases, many of which were provisioned by individual groups within the company and are not directly managed by the IT department.
The Phone Company therefore has a range of small, medium-sized, and large databases on both original equipment and on newer hardware.
The Phone Company has a different mix of servers, which results in a lower consolidation ratio and the requirement for a larger number of HP Enterprise DBC Appliances compared with World Wide Importers. In total, The Phone Company has 400 database instances, of which 220 or 55 percent are the 1U server type, 124 or 31 percent are 2U models, and 56 or
14 percent are 4U in size. When totaled, these servers take up 692U of rack space in the data center. This scenario assumes the same figure of 38U of usable server space for each rack.
The second change is that because of the preponderance of larger databases, the highest achievable consolidation ratio is 140:1. This figure affects the required number of HP
Enterprise DBC Appliances.
Finally, as a larger organization, The Phone Company has 16 copies of SQL Server 2008 R2
Enterprise Edition available to transfer to the new HP Enterprise DBC Appliances.
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With the new input figures, a total of three full HP Enterprise DBC Appliances are required to handle the The Phone Company database load. Table 9 sets out the estimations of annual costs for these input figures.
*
Item Physical servers
HP
Enterprise
DBC
Appliance
Difference Percentage reduction
Hardware
(depreciation)
Hardware
(maintenance)
Software
(amortization)
Software
(maintenance)
$0
$361,680
$0
$480,000
$0
$84,000
-$480,000
$361,680
-$84,000
N/A
100%
N/A
Power
Cooling
Floor space
Administration
Total
$0
$176,509
$170,691
$62,700
$700,000
$1,471,580
$434,940
-$434,940 N/A
$152,483
$24,026
$159,055
$11,636
$52,800
$9,900
$400,000
$300,000
$1,344,502 $258,929
86%
93%
84%
57%
9%
Table 9: Cost Summary for the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance in the The Phone Company Example
With an organization with a different mix of larger databases, there is still a significant financial benefit to be gained from moving to an HP Enterprise DBC Appliance, even before other, less-quantifiable benefits have been taken into account. These benefits include increased business agility, improved chargeback models, and greater data reliability.
*
The HP Enterprise DBC Appliance is not the only type of consolidation appliance on the market, and other vendors are developing and pricing their own solutions. The next section reviews one particular option, the VMware Vblock0 device, which is marketed through the
Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Company. This company has been formed to market consolidation and virtualization appliances that the VCE Coalition creates
— a coalition that consists of VMware, Cisco, and EMC.
Although the Vblock0 might be considered to be equivalent to the HP Enterprise DBC
Appliance, the Vblock0 device is a general-purpose virtualization consolidation platform and has not been optimized for database performance. Typical usage scenarios for the Vblock0 include desktop virtualization, which has a different loading pattern from database activity.
Vblock0 is not sold as a single SKU but as a configurable platform. The base model typically consists of the components that are shown in Table 10.
17
17 Vblock 0 Reference Architecture . http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/technicaldocumentation/h7189-vblock-0-reference-architecture.pdf
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Item
Compute
Chassis
Network
Storage
Vblock0
4-16 Cisco Unified Computing System Bseries half-slot blade servers
Cisco UCS 5108 chassis
Cisco Nexus 1000V
Cisco UCS Series 6120 fabric interconnects
Cisco Nexus 5010 data center switches
Single or dual EMC Celerra NS-120 units in a single rack with scaling to 46 terabytes
HP Enterprise DBC Appliance
8 x HP ProLiant BL465 G7, each dual processor with 12 cores, 256 GB of
RAM, and internal storage
HP BladeSystem c3000 Enclosure
HP Virtual Connect Flex-10
ProCurve E6600 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) switches
ProCurve E2910 1 Gpbs switches
4 x HP P2000 storage (398 146 GB
15K disks, 57 terabytes raw capacity)
Operating system
Management software
VMware vSphere with ESXi 4.0/vCenter update 1

EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure
Manager (UIM)

EMC Unisphere

VMware vCenter

Cisco UCS Manager

Advanced Management Pod
12 x HP Storageworks D2700
Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter
Edition with Hyper-V
SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
Edition (for the management suite)
System Center Configuration
Manager 2007 R3
System Center Operations Manager
2007 R2
System Center Virtual Machine
Manager 2008 R2
System Center Server Management
Suite Datacenter
HP Insight Control
Table 10: Comparison of Specifications for Vblock 0 and the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance
So how does the Vblock0 appliance compare for running costs? Table 11 compares the cost of acquisition and one year’s ownership for the VMware Vblock0 and the HP Enterprise DBC
Appliance. The VMware appliance is configured with the full complement of 32 processors.
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Item
Hardware (full rack)
VMware Enterprise
VMware Vblock0 HP Enterprise DBC
Appliance
$300,000
$139,808
Windows Server 2008 R2 $95,968
$800,000
$0
$0
$439,920 SQL Server 2008 R2 purchase
Windows Server SA
$879,840
$23,992
SQL Server 2008 R2 SA $219,960
Management software $100,000
(estimate) 18
$0
$109,980
$140,000
Management software SA $35,000
Total $ 1,759,568 $1,524,900
Table 11: Vblock0 Costs Compared with HP Enterprise DBC Appliance Costs
In total, the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance is estimated to be $234,668 or 13 percent cheaper to purchase and run for one year.
19
The most significant difference between the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance and Vblock0 is that the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance is specifically tuned for performance with database loads, whereas the Vblock0 appliance is a general-purpose virtualization platform. Database workloads have a distinctive performance profile that requires a high level of I/O, and the HP
Enterprise DBC Appliance was designed from the ground up with this in mind.
Microsoft and HP experts have designed the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance so that the ratio of blades to storage spindles results in a high rate of IOPS (60,000 per rack), and they have tested this configuration on the typical mix of database workloads found in customer environments. The result is an appliance that is optimized for DBC. By comparison, the
Vblock0 appliance is designed as a general-purpose virtualization solution that does not take into account the specific performance characteristics of database workloads.
The HP Enterprise DBC Appliance provides an exceptional platform for consolidating and managing your existing database environment for three main reasons. These reasons are:

Complete . The HP Enterprise DBC Appliance includes all of the hardware, software, and support
— everything you need to identify, migrate, and manage physical servers to create a consolidated, virtualized data center or private cloud. The hardware and
18 This figure is an estimate for this software based on the cost of the management software in the HP
Enterprise DBC Appliance.
19 Figures calculated from preproduction prices and assuming no transferable SQL Server 2008 R2
Enterprise Edition per-processor licences are available.
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software are already tuned and configured, and you benefit from a single point of support, making the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance a comprehensive all-in-one solution.

Optimized . The HP Enterprise DBC Appliance hardware is optimized for database workloads, and the appliance has been designed for optimal performance and energy efficiency. Additionally, the centralized monitoring and control of virtual machines that the appliance offers
— along with dynamic allocation of compute and storage resources
— helps you to optimize your database servers for the workloads you need to handle at any given time.

Agile . The HP Enterprise DBC Appliance is delivered as a fully functional device, so you can easily implement it within your environment. This is MUCH faster than a bespoke solution, and it enables you to be in operation far more quickly than you could be even with a reference architecture implementation. In addition, as your requirements grow, there is a straightforward migration path from the base configuration to the full configuration. The move to a private cloud increases IT agility through dynamic pooling of hardware resources. It also increases organizational agility through self-service infrastructure provisioning and business unit financial accountability based on resource usage.
Acquiring the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance is a far simpler process than taking the selfbuild route or even implementing the predefined reference architecture. When you have identified the size of appliance you need (half-rack, full rack, or multiple full rack), you simply contact your HP reseller or go direct to HP and order the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance. This single SKU includes:

Complete prebuild and configured HP hardware.

Preinstalled Microsoft management software and database instances.

HP Insight Control software.

Support Plus 24 for all of the hardware and software.
20
You then need to purchase any additional per-processor SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
Edition licenses to ensure that you have enough licenses for all of the processors in the HP
Enterprise DBC Appliance (maximum of 16 licenses). After you have licensed the physical processors, you then have the right to run any number of virtual SQL Server instances on those physical processors, regardless of the number of cores present. This approach is the most cost-effective way to license SQL Server in a virtual environment and is significantly cheaper than having large numbers of physical processors running SQL Server 2008 R2
Standard Edition.
When the configured rack is delivered, HP can provide assistance to commission the HP
Enterprise DBC Appliance and integrate it into your existing environment. With that commissioning and integration process complete, you can move on to consolidating and migrating databases within a matter of weeks rather than months.
20 Based on information prior to release. Actual support terms may differ.
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Consolidating SQL Server databases into a virtual environment is a valuable approach that can significantly reduce the operating cost of running multiple database instances on physical servers. Although several approaches to DBC are available, the simplest and lowest-risk route is to use a preconfigured, prebuilt, and fully optimized SQL Server consolidation appliance from HP Enterprise. This solution consists of:

Hardware from HP.

Software from Microsoft.

Support from HP for the entire solution.

A preconfigured design that is optimized for database workloads.
This modular appliance is simple to order and can typically support consolidation ratios of
200 to 1. It is available in half-rack and full rack configuration, with a half-rack typically able to consolidate 100 databases and a full rack typically able to consolidate 200 databases.
By moving to a virtualized database environment running on purpose-built, dedicated hardware, you can typically reduce your costs significantly. Although your results may vary, calculations suggest that the following reductions are achievable:

Energy costs: 89 percent

Cooling costs: 95 percent

Floor space costs: 88 percent

Administration costs: 75 percent
Overall, cost reductions on expenditure items are typically in the region of 78 percent, leading to payback times in the order of 1.9 years.
*
For more information about the HP Enterprise DBC Appliance, see the following resources:
HP Database Consolidation Solution for Microsoft SQL Server , at http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/partners/microsoft-database-consolidationsolution.html.
HP Database Consolidation Solution Optimized for SQL Server 2008 R2 Solution Brief , at http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA3-
4822ENW&cc=us&lc=en.
Consolidating Databases Using Virtualization Planning Guide , at http://technet.micros http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh307505.aspx oft.com/enus/library/hh307505.aspx.
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