Building Scalable Solutions with Windows Datacenter

While much of the rest of the world is gravitating toward grid technologies of one kind or another, Microsoft's bag is still to scale vertically when it comes to the database. With hardware prices on a perpetual downslide, at some point expertise in both areas will be very necessary.

Building Scalable Solutions with Windows Datacenter is a webinar that's easy to follow that has an overview of the version of Windows 2003 Server designed for up tp 64 CPUs, and 512GB of RAM. It's still very rare, but will probably become more common place as SQL Server continues to nibble market share from other vendors in the high-end space. Better to get a few key points on what makes it different now before your boss asks you your opinion.

One claim in the webinar is that just upgrading to Windows 2003 increases disk throughput by 100%. Sounds a bit crazy to me, but benchmarks are quoted. And something to note that I didn't see mentioned is that performance is very closely tied to hardware, and therefore Microsoft does not support customer installations of Datacenter. In this sense it is sometimes referred to as an "Intel Mainframe" operating system. That means you can only get such a machine preloaded from the vendor (which are very few at the moment, including Unisys). The only company I personally know of using Datacenter is EBSCO, the largest magazine publisher in the US. I'm sure there are plenty of others though.