How did you find the performance of the ES7000? Did you have any problems with the DS56525 cards over heating?

We have problems with the DX56332 cards overheating, the engineer said it's because the fan speed is 6900 rpm instead of 7000 rpm. We had to put the machines in an extra cold room just to get rid of the problem as we were going through 2 cards a month and at $800 a card it was costing a fortune. Anyone else had this problem?

You have to leave space between the DX56332 cards to stop them overheating

Use slots 1,3,5,7 and 9 or 2,4,6,8 and 10. This leaves enough ventalation space.

Dave,

I can't say whether the ES7000 outperformed another server as we didn't benchmark against other machines - they were purchased before I joined the company. However, my view was that it only takes one stored proc with a problem to bring the machine to a crawl, and then it doesn't matter whether you have 2 or 32 processors.

One example I recall was that we were getting a lot of compile blocks

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q263889

which was causing all subsequent requests to queue up while the recompilation occured.

We used the KEEPFIXED PLAN

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsql2k/html/sql_queryrecompilation.asp

to avoid compilation due to large inserts and deletes.
Note that we were happy to do this as the problems were occurring on permanent temporary tables (we got too much blocking using temp tables in tempdb) and the overall table size and index selectivity remained constant.
We also disabled parallelism, as with our short duration but high volume transactions, we felt this did not offer us any benefit.

We had one "issue" with the ES7000 but I'm not sure which component the problem was attributed to - I'll see if I can find out what it was.

Cheers Noel

Dave,

We had problems with the "Oscar" system clock. Apparently in early ES7000's it was a single point of failure, and guess what!! I understand newer versions have a dual clock.

Cheers

Noel

Noel,

We also had problems with our system clock, had to wind the damn thing up every morning otherwise is just stopped!

Mike