If you've ever wanted to use the cloud for a DR site, there's good news: as of this week you can use AlwaysOn Availability Groups and set up an asynchronous replica of your data into Amazon Web Services (AWS). If you're already in the cloud, or if you were holding off, this means that you…
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a platform that offers a ton of services ranging from block storage, operating systems, to mail queues, DNS, and caching. When you say “cloud”, a lot of people think of AWS. AWS hosts a variety of businesses, large and small. Unfortunately, you still have to administer and configure your servers.…
The cloud is robust and reliable. The cloud solves all of our scaling needs. The cloud makes my poop smell like roses. While all of these statements are theoretically true it takes some effort to make them true in reality, especially when a database is involved. Who Is Deploying SQL Server in EC2? A question…
When I talk to database administrators, I hear a lot of questions like: What is Amazon S3? What is Mechanical Turk? How do these things matter to a real business? I've got a story I like to tell around how to use these services, but for a couple of years I've held back from posting…
This week I presented at the SSWUG Virtual Conference on how to benchmark your storage performance with Microsoft's SQLIO utility. Last week I talked about running SQL Server in the cloud on Amazon EC2. Take those two things together, and we've got storage benchmarking on Amazon EC2 servers:
Maximum write speed: 68 MBs/sec
Maximum read speed: 8 MBs/sec
Sometimes you need an offsite database server in case something goes wrong, but you can't afford a full-blown disaster recovery datacenter. Or maybe you've got some ideas that you'd like to try out with a big SQL Server 2005 box, but you don't have the hardware sitting around idle. Or maybe you'd just like to…
