Demartek Evaluation Reports

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Demartek Evaluation - Improving SQL Server Database Performance with HPE MSA 2040 Flash Upgrades

February 2016

Solid state storage shows up in many places in the datacenter today, from all-flash arrays to direct attached drives and PCIe flash to accelerators that fit somewhere in between servers and storage. With the price of the flash continuing to drop, it is becoming increasing available to the small and medium business for critical computing applications and day-to-day operational computing.

The HPE MSA 2040 storage array delivers enterprise-class storage at a cost that may be attractive to small and medium businesses. These arrays can offer improved performance by replacing some hard disk drives (HDD) with solid state drives (SSD) for read caching or performance tiering. HPE commissioned Demartek to evaluate the performance of a Microsoft SQL Server database workload on the MSA 2040 Fibre Channel array in an all-HDD configuration and then repeat the workload with the SSD read caching and SSD performance tiering options installed and configured.

We compared several performance metrics including bandwidth, IOPs, number of database transactions per second, and I/O latency for a complete picture of the MSA 2040’s suitability to support the scale of workload a small to medium size business might experience.


Evaluation Series: HPE MSA 2040 Flash Upgrades

Recently Demartek evaluated the HPE MSA 2040 with Flash Upgrades for different types of workloads. The workloads tested and their results are available at these links:



View the Demartek Evaluation - Improving SQL Server Database Performance with HPE MSA 2040 Flash Upgrades

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