In today’s world information is a valuable asset that demands the right tools to collect and manage critical business data. As the volume and velocity of data increase, however, extracting meaningful insight in a timely manner becomes more complex. It’s important for businesses of all sizes to choose a database solution that matches the requirements of the company, resulting in the most efficient outcome.

Lenovo Solutions for Microsoft SQL Server on ThinkSystem SR650 V3 are optimized for both Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Data Warehouse (DW) and are Accelerated by Intel offerings. This technical brief features Microsoft SQL Server 2022 running on a high-performance Lenovo dual-socket 2U rack mount enterprise server. The server can support both 4th and 5th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, TruDDR5 4800MT/s memory and P5620 NVMe drives among a variety of storage options, including support for the PCIe 5.0 standard devices for I/O. The Intel 5th generation processors support up to 64 cores, 385 watts and 96GB 5600 speed memory (The performance test section provides a comparison between 4th and 5th generation Intel processors).

The SR650 V3 server is a storage dense offering, with up to 40 2.5" drive bays in the front, middle and rear of the server and 5 different slot configurations at the rear of the server. Onboard NVMe PCIe ports allow direct connections to 16 NVMe SSDs, which frees up PCIe slots and lowers NVMe solution acquisition costs.

Lenovo SR650 V3 systems are methodically tested and tuned to save you months of configuration, setup, testing, and tuning. With these new servers, you get the following advantages:

• Realize 40% better performance for workloads running on 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors than on similar servers equipped with previous generation processors
• Improve performance of SQL Server solutions with higher core counts, memory bandwidth and PCIe Gen 5 devices
• Improve density and support more and larger databases per host

SQL Server 2022 includes updates to existing features like Intelligent Query Processing in addition to management, platform or language.

Starting with SQL 2022, runtimes for R, Python, and Java are no longer installed with SQL Setup. Instead, install any desired custom runtime(s) and packages.

Here are some performance enhancements in SQL Server 2022:

• Improvements have been made to all columnstore indexes that benefit from enhanced segment elimination by data type.
• Concurrent updates to global allocation map pages reduce page latch contention
• Improvements in buffer pool scan operations on large-memory systems by using multiple CPU cores for parallel scans
• Improvements to Clustered ColumnStore Indices to sort existing data in memory before index builder compresses the data
• Support for Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) backup compression with software or hardware acceleration (only software compression is available in SQL Standard)
• TempDB performance enhancements for scalability
• Shrink database uses low priority processing to minimize impact on performance
• In-memory OLTP enhancements

Here are some management improvements:

• Additional Azure integration
• Link to Azure SQL Managed Instance
• Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR)
• Always On Availability Group enhancements

SQL Server Enterprise Edition delivers comprehensive database capabilities with end-to-end business intelligence, enabling high service levels for mission-critical workloads. SQL Server Standard Edition includes basic database and business intelligence for smaller organizations that need less features, benefiting from the lower cost compared to SQL Server Enterprise Edition. A detailed comparison of SQL editions can be found here.

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V3 offerings are ideal for modernizing your legacy SQL Server applications because of their low cost and high-performance capabilities. They are industry standard x86 servers providing cost effective computing and fast high-density local storage.

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V3 servers offer the necessary performance for bare metal or virtualized SQL Servers. High performance can be achieved using Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct technology which are built into Windows Server. Several technologies like NVMe storage and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking are natively supported in Windows Server to enable the highest levels of performance.

The configurations feature the following main components:

These high-performance database solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2022 Enterprise and Standard Editions feature the latest Intel Optane NVMe SSDs. These SSDs help build a low latency solution for mission critical SQL Server applications.

SQL Server 2022 introduces backup performance improvements with a new compression algorithm and hardware offloading and acceleration with Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT).

Improvements can be seen with either software only compression or by using Intel hardware that supports QAT offloading and acceleration. Intel offers on-chip QAT hardware offloading with the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors. SQL Server 2022 Enterprise Edition supports hardware or software QAT while SQL Server 2022 Standard Edition only supports software QAT.

The benefits of hardware QAT include:

• Reduced backup capacity
• Minimal CPU impact
• Minimal workload impact
• Faster backups
• Faster restores

In software only mode, it still utilizes the Intel QAT algorithm to improve backup times.

The table below shows Lenovo test results of hardware mode QAT backups. We saw considerable performance improvement over the standard MS_XPRESS compression method and additional improvement with Intel Gen5 processors.

Backup and Restore Tests

The tests were run with the server under load, at 98% CPU usage, backing up a 1000 scale TPCH database. This is where the most benefit can be seen with QAT as it performs a hardware offload to improve backup performance. There is significant improvement over the standard SQL compression during heavy loads.

Enable and Configure QAT

Enable QAT:

sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1

GO

RECONFIGURE with override

GO

sp_configure 'hardware offload enabled', 1

GO

RECONFIGURE with override

GO

Restart SQL to apply

Enable QAT hardware mode

ALTER SERVER CONFIGURATION

SET HARDWARE_OFFLOAD = ON (ACCELERATOR = QAT)

Restart SQL to apply

Verify QAT status:

SELECT * FROM

sys.dm_server_accelerator_status;

GO

Restart the SQL instance to apply changes

Run Backups

No compression

BACKUP DATABASE [TPC-H1000] TO DISK = 'D:\backups\MSSQL1.bak' WITH FORMAT, NO_COMPRESSION

MS_XPRESS compression

BACKUP DATABASE [TPC-H1000] TO DISK = 'D:\backups\MS-XPRESS.bak' WITH FORMAT, COMPRESSION (ALGORITHM = MS_XPRESS)

GO

QAT compression

BACKUP DATABASE [TPC-H1000] TO DISK = 'D:\backups\QAT-DEFLATE.bak' WITH FORMAT, COMPRESSION (ALGORITHM = QAT_DEFLATE)

GO

For a high-performance SQL Server solution, implement the following best practices:

• Configure UEFI (Bios) settings to set Operating mode to Maximum performance.
• Configure power profile in Windows Server to ‘High performance’.
• SQL server database and log drives are recommended to be formatted with 64KB NTFS cluster size.
• SQL server database and log files should be on separate physical drives.
• The OS and SQL server binary drives are recommended to be formatted with standard 4KB NTFS cluster size.
• TempDB is shared by many processes and users as a temporary working area and should be configured appropriately. Default configuration will be suitable for most workloads. Use the install experience for guided configuration. More info in Microsoft TempDB Database documentation.
• If the server is dedicated to the SQL Server workload, use the default dynamic memory management model or follow Microsoft SQL documentation guidelines for manually configuring memory options if finer grain control is desired.

Figure 1. Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V3

For a high-performance SQL Server Standard Edition solution, implement the following best practices:

• Configure UEFI (BIOS) settings to set Operating mode to Maximum performance.
• Enable Hyper-threading in the BIOS
• In the Bios, set the core count per processor to 12 because SQL Standard Edition is limited to 48 processors. With 2 sockets, and Hyper-threading enabled this equals 48.
• Configure power profile in Windows Server to ‘High performance'.
• SQL server database and log drives are recommended to be formatted with 64KB NTFS cluster size.
• SQL server database and log files should be on separate physical drives.
• The OS and SQL server binary drives are recommended to be formatted with standard 4KB NTFS cluster size.
• TempDB is shared by many processes and users as a temporary working area and should be configured appropriately. Default configuration will be suitable for most workloads. Use the install experience for guided configuration. More info in Microsoft TempDB Database documentation.
• If the server is dedicated to the SQL Server workload, use the default dynamic memory management model or follow Microsoft SQL documentation guidelines for manually configuring memory options if finer grain control is desired.

HammerDB Configuration and Intel Gen 3 - Gen 4 - Gen 5 Comparison

HammerDB is an open-source load testing / benchmarking tool for databases available at: http:///www.hammerdb.com. It offers tools for testing performance on OLTP and Analytics workloads. The OLTP workload is based on TPC-C benchmark from http://www.tpc.org and the Analytics workload is based on TPC-H benchmark from tpc.org. Hammerdb 4.7 was run on a separate load server. Below are details of the testing and results.

TPM = Transactions per minute; QpH = Queries per hour

Intel Balanced Configuration

This section covers additional 5th-generation testing on the Gold 6548+ 24-core processor for SQL Enterprise Edition and the Gold 6544Y 16-core processor for SQL Standard Edition. These are considered more balanced for SMB-sized customers and workloads. They provide a balanced combination of performance and cost benefits. Also covered below is QAT backup testing on SQL 2022 Enterprise Edition.

SQL Server 2022 Enterprise Edition and Intel Xeon Gold 6548Y+

Figure 2 TPC-C SQL Enterprise 8548Y test results

Figure 3 TPC-H SQL Enterprise 8548Y test results

Figure 4 QAT test results with 6548Y+ and system idle

Figure 5 QAT test results with 6548Y+ and system under load

Figure 6 TPC-C SQL Standard Edition 6544Y test results

Figure 7 TPC-H SQL Standard Edition 6544Y test results

Why Lenovo

Lenovo is a US$70 billion revenue Fortune Global 500 company serving customers in 180 markets around the world. Focused on a bold vision to deliver smarter technology for all, we are developing world-changing technologies that power (through devices and infrastructure) and empower (through solutions, services and software) millions of customers every day.

For More Information

To learn more about this Lenovo solution contact your Lenovo Business Partner or visit: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/servers-storage/solutions/database/

References:

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V3: https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp1601

Microsoft SQL Server 2022: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/what-s-new-in-sql-server-2022?view=sql-server-ver16