Large-scale enterprises need not pay extortionate amounts of money for high-end databases running on Unix platforms maintained by highly skilled, rare and expensive system administrators. But they do need to pay attention to the underlying system architecture, warns Bernard Donnelly, consultancy services manager: Unisys Africa.
A centralised approach makes sense when seeking performance, scalability and manageability in a large-scale enterprise database deployment, and high-end Unix platforms have successfully achieved this for many years.
But Unix can prove expensive in terms of the hardware and personnel required to support it. The alternative is Intel processor-based hardware with a Windows operating system and a Microsoft-hosted database management system.
However, it is common cause that this type of system does not scale well. The benefit if it did scale would be that the Intel and Microsoft solution could be a lot cheaper to deploy, support and maintain than the Unix-based environment. But traditional approaches to deploying Microsoft-based enterprise databases mean losing the centralisation, and therefore manageability that Unix offers, and it pushes up the cost, effectively negating that potential benefit.
Unisys has met the challenge, building its ES 7000 Intel-based server on the same principles it used in its mainframe architectures to ensure performance, reliability, scalability and manageability. It has also worked closely with Microsoft to develop Microsoft`s Windows 2000 Datacenter Server and this combination currently holds the SAP SD benchmark record of 26 000 concurrent users.
What is commonly misunderstood in a distributed architecture is that continual database synchronisation must take place between the database servers. This creates an overhead drain on the servers and as transactions increase, so does the overhead. Offsetting this overhead requires more servers, but even then overhead is increased. Adding servers and redistributing the database also takes administrator effort and performance benefits diminish rapidly with successive server insertions. A centralised database running on a single, scalable server does not have database synchronisation overhead and can take full advantage of additional processors and memory.
Integrated health fund manager Medscheme is a demonstration of the scalability and reliability available, having invested in four ES7000 which it expects to last five years. A spokesperson states: "We are enjoying mainframe-like levels of reliability, uptime and performance from a system with up-front and running costs that come in at a fraction of the price of the proprietary alternatives."
Other South African clients have shown the consolidation capability of the ES7000 aggregating the load previously run on over 30 servers into a single SQL cluster. The solution is so reliable that they have not had a single application outage in over 18 months of operation.
Unisys is changing the common perception that Microsoft`s SQL database is not commonly associated with mission-critical, scalable enterprise environments running revenue-generating applications such as ERP, point of sale, order entry, CRM and numerous other supporting systems.
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