With the growth in demand for Microsoft SQL Server 2005, there is increased interest in understanding how best to provide database services with traditional Web service offerings, and how best to use the capabilities of SQL Server 2005 to enhance the value of traditional database hosting. SQL Server 2005 brings several key improvements over SQL Server 2000 and so can improve your scalability, manageability, and customized service offerings to attract sophisticated customers. The following sections help identify the ways in which using SQL Server can improve service offerings, performance, and manageability for any service provider.

Shared Hosting

In any shared SQL Server environment many customers use one SQL Server Database engine (on one computer/host) to provide databases for multiple customers. Following is the list of ways SQL Server can be configured and used to provide databases from a shared resource:

• Shared servers with Internet Information Services (IIS) locally — SQL Server can be configured to run on the same server with IIS (Web site provider). In this configuration, the many Web sites and databases are all on a single machine. Drawbacks of this choice are associated with resource requirements (disk and memory consumption), and potentially less stringent security, because the database engine is not remote.

  An advantage of this choice is that all Web site to database traffic is local traffic and network traffic is minimized. The Windows-based Hosting does not recommend this configuration because we promote the more stringent security model of using remote servers.

• Shared remote servers — This configuration enables one server running SQL Server to support multiple front-end Web servers; it enables a strategic disk array configuration for the SQL Engine, and eliminates other resource conflicts. In this configuration, it is easier to apply other high availability features for SQL Server, like clustering. However, remote servers will require network traffic and a separate hardware platform for the SQL Server database engine. Besides the configuration of Dedicated SQL Servers provided on a shared host (described below), Windows-based Hosting recommends remote servers for shared environments. The two reasons for this postion are better scalability, which is paramount in a hosting environment and contributes to our ability to deliver efficient management of database resources, and our security policy.

• Virtual dedicated servers — Service providers today are offering virtual servers to customers. While they appear to be fully independent machines, in reality they are running on one host, which is multitenant. Because the server appears as an independent server, the installation of SQL Server is independent. Because of that, it is a dedicated server and is configured as a dedicated SQL Server server. However, the host must still be monitored as a shared resource, because it would likely have two or more virtual servers.

• SQL Server instances — SQL Server has the ability to be installed several times on one server (host). This enables you to offer virtual instances of SQL Server a second way. Instead of providing a separate virtual operating system and SQL Server installation, you can provide just the SQL Server instance to the customer. This offers a reduction in resource requirements over the complete virtualization described above. It is still a shared environment because one computer runs multiple instances of SQL Server.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting is providing a dedicated server and (potentially) an application like SQL Server to the customer. It becomes more complex as you decide how to provision services around your offering. There are generally two choices: managed and discount dedicated hosting

• Managed hosting — You agreed to provide additional services. This is where you can offer services in return for income and can differentiate yourself from your competitors. Here, your flexibility in service offerings can potentially impact your market share. To do this you must understand what customers need, want, and are willing to pay for. Furthermore, you must manage your environment so that you can meet your Service Level Agreements (SLA).

• Discount dedicated hosting — You provide electricity, network connectivity, and the operating system is usually booted and running. Any issues not related to these three basic deliverables are often the customer's responsibility.

Today, regarding SQL Server 2005, the market has service providers that provide very different offerings from one another. Some offer fully clustered and managed SQL Servers in which the customer has no admin privileges, while others offer services where the managed part is merely to verify that the SQL Server agent is running, and the engine responds to an intermittent query. The Service Offers section describes how you can use the new features in SQL Server 2005 to craft offers that use this functionality.

Service Offers

With SQL Server 2005, there is an opportunity to craft specialized offers to target specific user communities such as SQL Server Express developers or customers who require high availability or performance features. In the traditional database hosting environment, customers are limited in the functionality that’s offered to them. Many times what differentiates offers from a Gold to a Platinum service is the number of databases and the space they may consume. While this may be entirely appropriate for some, this method doesn’t make use of the richness of SQL Server 2005.

There are many high availability improvements in SQL Server 2005. One that can be implemented outside of clustering is database mirroring. This allows customers to have access to rapid failover in case an unplanned outage occurs.

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