Long shot - odd question re. very powerful server

[MeGaMaN]

A while back, for reasons I won't go into, a colleague at work convinced our boss to buy a very powerful server for our team with the expectation it would massively speed up a critical business process vs our old (but still powerful!) server. Needless to say it wasn't cheap!

New server - 88 core Intel Xeon E5-4699 v4 @ 2.2GHZ processor & 256 GB RAM (Windows Server 2012 Standard R2 OS).

Old server - 40 core Intel Xeon E7-4870 @ 2.4GHZ processor & 128 GB RAM (Windows Server 2008 Enterprise R2 OS).

The colleague has since left the business and it transpires the server has not delivered the value to the business he expected i.e. it did not significantly speed up the process it was purchased for vs our older server. Since then, both of the above servers are not being used at all, just sat gathering dust.

My team do a lot of data analytics, mostly using Microsoft SQL Server. We looked into the possibility of installing Microsoft SQL Server onto this server but the licensing costs were hundreds of thousands of pounds so decided against that!

Does anyone know of any (serious!) ideas we could use these servers for? Anyone have experience of any open source (i.e. free to license) alternatives to Microsoft SQL Server?

Long shot I know but figured can't hurt to ask...

 

[MeGaMaN]

Thanks for the reply, I manage a team of analysts in the research & development dept for a multinational retailer. Re. what problem are you trying to solve, we can get asked any question imaginable that could relate to the business and have to think of a sensible way of answering it, based on the data that is available.

We use MS SQL mainly, on a managed server, to pull vast amounts of data from all of the various systems into a central location where we develop our own pseudo systems to cleanse, aggregate and ultimately analyse to advise the senior business stakeholders on the best strategy to take the business forwards.

We are often crunching vast amounts of data and, whilst MS SQL is not neccessarily the best tool to do this, it is where our skillset sits, but more recently we are finding as the data we are analysing is growing exponentially, the queries are taking longer and longer to run.

Given Microsoft's SQL Server licensing model is based on the number of cores on the server, this new server we own but are not using would cost over half a million pounds to license which is not going to happen.

I was wondering if there are any other similar database / query languages very similar to MS SQL to learn but open source / very cheap to license that I could install on the new server with a view to, on an adhoc basis, manually load large datasets into then set the box off to crunch the data.

Or, if we are to truly embrace data science (rather than trying to find the patterns in the data manually), are there any data science "toolsets" out there we could install on the box for minimal outlay.

Appreciate these are rather vague questions I'm asking but geniunely don't know where to start as my skillset is not on the technical server side of things!

 

[MeGaMaN]

Hi Vince, thank you for taking the time to reply.

Re. the licensing questions, this is out of my dept's jurisdiction - we have a Licensing department and their advice was we couldn't install MS SQL as it would cost over half a million pounds (albeit for a few years). Based on the numbers you have just quoted, I'm guessing it was Enterprise edition as $7128 * 88 cores = $627k which is in the same ballpark as half a million pounds.

But I'm definitely no expert - the licensing department have said if we want it, we need to be willing to pay half a million pounds.

Re. the tuning question yes, we are doing what we can to make queries as efficient as possible. We are self taught so I'm not for one second suggesting our databases are set up optimally but we are sensible with our approach and understand the concepts of good indexing practices, server statistics etc. that impact the way the SQL query optimiser works. Also appreciate you can spend a lifetime optimizing & tuning databases (which is absolutely not our skillset) - we have a department of technical specialist database administrators who do this.

I'm guessing a large part of the issue is we have maybe 15 - 30 analysts working concurrently, running complex queries (as well as the batches that are running in the background).

Just to get back on point though with my OP, I'm really looking to see if there is anything we can take an inexpensive punt on with this server to see if we can get any value out of it. Failing that, I'll just recommend we sell it to recoup what little we can (it cost over £30k in parts alone when new maybe 2 or 3 years ago).