The DL785 has been in constant demand since it arrived in September, 2008 - mostly doing SQL work of course.  The 8-socket form factor for an x64 system is still not widely known about among the customers that come to the lab.  The fact remains that most SQL Server workloads run on 4 socket or smaller platforms.  With the number of cores per socket continuing to climb, you can get a lot of RDBMS work out of a 4 socket - quad or six core system.  One area where the bigger 8-socket platforms are in high demand is in data warehousing.

The Fast Track SQL Server SMP data warehouse materials are out.  You can check out all the details here (http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/fasttrack.aspx).  Fast Track consists of a set of guidelines for building "balanced systems".  The Fast Track materials are specifically designed to describe CPU core-balanced configurations to support sequential I/O data access workloads.  The materials are very specific about the optimizations for sequential I/O workloads.  Of course there is no real world workload that is 100% sequential I/O all the time.   You will have to determine where you have a good fit to your particular workload before adopting this approach.

In addition to describing an approach for configuring CPU core-balanced systems for sequential I/O, the Fast Track team applied the methodology to a wide array of currently shipping server and storage options at various levels of scale.  The link above has all the details. 

My current interest is in how to apply the techniques of the Fast Track approach to assessing hardware performance at the component level.  We have been advocating the use of tools like IOMeter and SQLIOStress to validate disk subsystem performance for years.  The Fast Track documents give me a standardized way to look at overall system balance in the context of workload and system setup that utilize the SQL binaries directly.

The first thing I'm going to do is run a CPU Consumption Rate analysis on the DL785.  The server current has the Opteron 8354 2.4 Ghz processors (Barcelona)that came with it last fall.  It has been in such high demand we haven't taken time to upgrade them.  I'm getting newer ones soon so I want to try running the CPU Consumption Rate both before and after the upgrade.  Nothing official, just an attempt to learn more about the Fast Track approach by getting my hands dirty.  Not like dirt under the finger nails dirty though.  Computer techs stay much cleaner these days.  More on CPU consumption rates soon...