In the first of this series I discuss that some organizations are over provisioning their server resources in order to balance competing performance and data protection SLAs. Let’s look in detail at one example of this, “the backup tax” for doing native SQL Server backups.
Challenge: The Backup Tax – The following graph shows the results of testing of backup processing on a transactional (TPC-C style) workload running in SQL Server. It illustrates one example of a tax rate of 40%.
The graph of the results shows that approx. 40% of the CPU cycles provisioned for SQL server must be reserved in order to make sure that service levels for performance are met during backup with the SQL Server native backup utility.
Conclusion: Simultaneously meeting service level agreements for performance and data protection while using the native SQL server backup requires at least 40% over-provisioning of your database server resources. And this assumes that you’re willing to run your database server at 100% utilization during the backup window. This is an exorbitant 40% tax rate that you shouldn’t have to pay.
For more information on the testing that was done please refer to: http://dell.to/w35fsv
Let’s hear from you, what do you pay for backup taxes? What is your tax reduction strategy?
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