Have you been tasked with capacity planning for your SQL Server estates and do not know where to begin?
Good news! On November 24th at 11am ET, we are broadcasting a webinar, “Significantly Reduce Costs with SQL Governor,” with Kevin Kline, Principal Program Manager at SentryOne, and Jani K. Savolainen, Founder and CTO of SQL Governor, that discusses some common capacity planning questions, including:
- How do I begin the migration process to the cloud?
- How long in the future will my systems have capacity?
Below is a recap of the interactive session between Kevin and Jani.
Webinar Q&A
Q: Can you please introduce yourself and tell us about the activities at SQL Governor?
Jani: My name is Jani K. Savolainen; I am the founder and CTO of SQL Governor. I’ve been working with SQL Servers for about 20 years, since version 6.5.SQL Governor is a capacity planning tool for SQL Server estates. Whether you are having a rightsizing, modernization of your data platform or migration consolidation, SQL Governor can provide a solution.
Q: Can you tell us a bit more about SQL Governor?
Jani: I remember some research from Microsoft years ago, which pointed out that about 70% of performance problems are because of bad code and 30% of the performance problems are due to the infrastructure and poor capacity planning. SQL Governor addresses this problem of capacity planning very efficiently. Server rightsizing means that we take all the performance data on SQL Server and analyze them in the form of time series. Then we do mathematical magic like trend and benchmark extrapolation of these time series over time. Another core functionality of the SQL Governor is machine learning–based SQL Server instance consolidation.
Q: What is it about the product that is able to do things so much better and more uniquely than what a team of architects would do by hand?
Jani: For example, it’s solving a not so trivial problem if you take, for example, instance consolidation, on-premises or into a cloud. There are quite a lot of moving parts. The SQL Server instance and database time series data must be monitored in decent granularity. So, it must be a tight enough time window to get the relevant performance data out, what SQL Sentry is doing. Then, we get the time series data and aggregate it on an hourly level. Then, we extrapolate the time series based on given trends and CPU benchmark ratio in between the source and target servers within the constraints like the threshold levels and SLAs given, and finally fit the SQL Server instances into automated target server templates in a way that the minimum number of CPU cores and target servers needs to be used without sacrificing performance or availability of the system. This is a bit like playing a multidimensional Tetris. We have international patents granted on this methodology. Our customers have achieved about 40% SQL Server license savings on average so far by using the SQL Governor software.
Q:What is in it for the customer who already has a large SentryOne installation across their enterprise, or maybe a partner who runs an MSP or a remote DBA service?
Jani: Ok, so first, the API is very simple. It’s basically a set of stored procedures that is going to be installed on the SQL Sentry repository and then there are SSIS ETL packages on the SQL Governor software side that is extracting the monitoring data, if there is, like many months of data already, which is actually fantastic. So, there is no additional workload on customer SQL Servers.
Q: How would a prospect who is interested in SQL Governor go about the purchase process? How is it licensed?
Jani: We have a very flexible subscription model. Don’t hesitate to contact us to learn more.
Q: Tell us a little bit about how you keep up with a variety of hardware vendors and keep vendor data up to date.
Jani: We have a thorough repository on that. We have cumulative updates for the SQL Governor Repository. The cumulative updates typically come in one or two months and the repository data is updated on a quarterly basis.
Q: How can someone follow up to get a SQL Governor demo?
Jani: If you see a business opportunity here on growing migration and cloud transition competence area, please contact us and we can book you a demonstration. Whether your customer is struggling with SQL Server rightsizing or consolidation planning, we can help you.
Conclusion
Thank you to Kevin and Jani for participating in this webinar! I hope you will view the “Significantly Reduce Costs with SQL Governor” webinar on November 24th or on-demand after that broadcast. And check out the resources listed below for further information.
Tamika S. White is a senior product marketing manager; she is responsible for developing and implementing go-to-market programs for SentryOne products. Her experience includes product marketing, product management, and marketing at Wells Fargo, MetLife, and AvidXchange. In her free time, she loves traveling, watching documentaries, spending time with family, and cooking.
