Chapter 1: Challenges of today’s typical infrastructure model for SQL Server
by Don Jones

SQL Server can be an organization’s greatest asset and—from a corporate management perspective—its worst enemy. The reason is SQL Server places a heavy demand on infrastructure resources such as servers, the network, and storage. Many organizations continually struggle to scale their SQL Server installations to meet business demand—including requirements for availability in the face of hardware failure—while at the same time bemoaning the “data center bloat” that seems to be the unavoidable companion of large SQL Server installations.

In fact, SQL Server and “data center bloat” don’t necessarily go together any more than SQL Server and “difficult to manage” do. With the right tools and techniques, you can have a top-performing SQL Server infrastructure without having to cram your data centers with so much hardware that they’re all but overflowing. Some of these tools and techniques may not seem very obvious, which is perhaps why many SQL Server architects don’t discover them right away. They are, however, extremely effective. As Chapter 1 explores, it’s all about infrastructure optimization, or letting your application get the very most from the infrastructure that it’s running on.

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