APS was created by Microsoft and hardware partners to address the latest trends in Big Data. The APS Appliance is an MPP solution, formerly called SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW). It comes ready to handle expanding data volumes, varieties of data types, and economical processing of high volume data, and consists of three solutions: a PDW, HDInsight, and Polybase.
If your company has large scaled up SQL servers that support analytic workloads, here are two ways it can benefit from APS.
Convert your SQL Server Enterprise Edition SKUs to or towards APS
Microsoft is now allowing customers apply their SQL Server Enterprise Edition (EE) licenses toward the purchase of an APS appliance. If your organization has unused licenses of SQL Server EE, those licenses can be applied to the purchase of the APS appliance. Additionally, if your organization has several large SQL Server EE boxes you are looking to upgrade or migrate, those licenses can be converted and applied towards the purchase of an APS appliance. For example, 32 Cores of SQL Server EE can be converted to a 2 node APS Appliance capable of holding 45 TB of data and capable of scanning 1 TB of data in less than 22 seconds.
Take Advantage of the Cloud via Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Is your organization already interested in APS, but not ready to buy a physical appliance or unsure what you need? Microsoft’s APS appliance technology will soon be available (public preview this summer) in the cloud as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering called Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Use the highly elastic cloud solution to dynamically add compute nodes at the click of a button and see the effects on your data solutions. When you are ready, you can choose to buy a physical APS appliance for your company’s data center, or you can keep using the cloud solution offering on a day-to-day basis with no commitments, and even save money by turning your compute cycles off when they aren’t used.
How do I know if I am ready for APS?
BlueGranite’s APS Readiness Assessment is designed to help you determine if Microsoft’s APS will provide an effective return on investment and improve analytics and business customer satisfaction.
We focus on existing reporting and data structures to determine if there is an appropriate workload for APS. Careful analysis of the current state of reporting and data consumption will be done along with developing an understanding of the future plans for scale and growth as well as an analysis of current data and data structures to determine their compatibility with the APS architecture.
Then, our team will present a comprehensive analysis along with a recommended roadmap and plan to aid the customer in their assessment of APS as the foundation of their data analytics environment. Contact us to get started today.
