DB Best Technologies recently partnered with Kingston Technologies to demonstrate SQL Server 2017 with 8 virtual cores (vCores) and Kingston Technologies DC500M Enterprise Solid State Drives (SSD) runs faster than SQL Server 2008 R2 with 16 vCores using hard drives (HDD). We typically find when we work with customers looking to upgrade their SQL Server 2008 servers to newer versions of SQL Server that these systems are using HDD drives for data, log, and tempdb. Based on prior benchmarking we’ve done with other hardware manufacturers and cloud vendors, we had a pretty good idea that by moving older versions of SQL Server to SQL Server 2017 using SSD for data log, and tempdb that you could use less vCores. The chart below shows the results of running the HammerDB TPC-C benchmark with SQL Server 2017 running on 8 vCores and Kingston Data Center DC500M SATA 6GBps 960 GB drives out performs SQL Server 2008 R2 on 16 vCores and Dell 400-ATJL 10,000 RPM SAS 12 GBps 1.2 TB HDDs. What this means to you as you upgrade your SQL Server 2008 R2 servers to SQL Server 2017 is that you can cut your SQL Server licensing costs in half with better performance!
