Does anyone have information/ideas about offloading SQL data processes to other hardware, possibly in a cloud environment (internal or external)? We have nightly processes that we really don’t have the processing power to complete in a nightly fashion and are looking for other alternatives. We are considering new hardware, but that won’t happen for a while.
More details about out situation:
We are using & licensed(SA) for Sql Server 2008, 2 cpu currently. The server is backended by an EVA 4000 with maxed out spindles. Our database is almost 2TB in size. We have lots of nightly processes that crunch data for summary tables and that do scheduling of our customer email sends. Currently, we are limited by what the EVA can physically do. Most of the time, the read and writes are what take the longest. We are considering moving off the EVA for something else, but this will not happen until 2013 or 2014.
I would recommend you checkout Amazon Web Services: http://aws.amazon.com/running_databases/