SQL Pass Announcements - New SQL Server 2008 R2 Editions

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Two new premium editions in SQL Server 2008 R2

SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter

Built on SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter delivers a high-performing data platform that provides the highest levels of scalability for large application workloads, virtualization and consolidation, and management for an organization’s database infrastructure. Datacenter helps enable organizations to cost effectively scale their mission-critical environment.

Key features new to Datacenter:

  • Application and Multi-Server Management for enrolling, gain insights and managing greater than 25 instances
  • Highest virtualization support for maximum ROI on consolidation and virtualization.
  • High-scale complex event processing with SQL Server StreamInsight
  • Supports more than 8 processors and up to 256 logical processors for highest levels of scale
  • Supports memory limits up to OS maximum

SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse (Project “Madison”)

SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse is a highly scalable data warehouse appliance-based solution. Parallel Data Warehouse delivers performance at low cost through a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture and integration with hardware partners – scale your data warehouse from the tens to hundreds terabyte up to a petabyte.

  • 10s to 100s TBs to 1+ PB enabled by MPP architecture
  • Advanced data warehousing capabilities like Star Join Queries and Change Data Capture
  • Integration with SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS
  • Supports industry standard data warehousing hub and spoke architecture and grid copy

Investments in core SQL Server 2008 R2 editions

SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise

SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise delivers a comprehensive data platform that provides built-in security, availability, and scale coupled with robust business intelligence offerings—helping enable the highest service levels for mission-critical workloads.

The following capabilities are new to Enterprise:

  • Application and Multi-Server Management for enrolling, gain insights and managing up to  25 instances
  • Master Data Services for data consistency across heterogeneous systems
  • Data Compression now enabled with UCS-2 Unicode support

SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard

SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard delivers a complete data management and business intelligence platform for departments and small organizations to run their applications—helping enable effective database management with minimal IT resources.

The following capabilities are new to Standard:

  • Backup Compression to reduce data backup storage by up to 60% and reduce time spent on backups
  • Can be a managed instance for Application and Multi-Server Management

New Benchmarks for SQL Server 2008 R2

With the support for greater than 64 logical processors, SQL Server 2008 R2 is taking advantage of multi-core processors and enabling customers to run larger workloads with higher throughput. On Nov. 3, Microsoft will announce a new world record TPC-E(OLTP) performance on a 96-core server. For data warehousing, again taking advantage of our new support for greater than 64 logical processors, we are announcing the best ever Windows Server and SQL Server 3TB TPC-H(DW) performance benchmark.

Other key industry trends include solid state disks and virtualization. SQL Server is demonstrating its strength at both these trends by announcing record beating performance for our web based Dynamics CRM offering (xRM) using solid state discs and Hyper-v on commodity hardware. 

Fast Track 2.0:

Fast Track 2.0 is the latest release of SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse that enables customers to accelerate their data warehouse projects at low cost.   Fast Track 2.0 features IBM as a new Partner with 3 new Reference Architectures.  In addition, Fast Track 2.0 also has updated Reference Architectures from existing Track Partners - HP, Dell, EMC and Bull. 

Fast Track 2.0 offers customers:

  • More choice with up to 12 Reference Architectures from HP, Dell, Bull, IBM and EMC
  • More scale with configurations that that scale from 4 – 48 TB
  • Fast Track 2.0 configurations now use Intel’s Nehalem and Dunnington processors as well as AMD’s 6-core Opteron processors