Constantly expanding and with a reputation as IT Leaders, this Organisation have an opportunity for a SQL Server DBA Team Leader to join them and lead an experienced team forward. Please note that you be eligible for SC Clearance for this role (Min 5 years in the UK!) This is an established team of SQL Server DBA's who need managing, which will cover 1 to 1's, PDR's, training etc. The team are responsible for managing database builds and configuration, monitoring trends in database activity, ensuring that database incidents are investigated, diagnosed and resolved. You will ensure.That you evaluate, document and deploy new releases to improve efficiency, reduce costs and deliver an infrastructure to the business. Work with IT Services teams to ensure appropriate skills exist to provide support in order to deliver the infrastructure to the business. Educate those in closely-related technical areas about database technologies and the impact on their work, to ensure that they are used correctly in order to give maximum business benefit.

Whether you have one server or 500 servers, the movement of backup files either to tape or disk storage will have some affect on your network bandwidth. One best practice is to write your backup files to disk and then archive to tape. When writing to disk, it is wise not to write to the same physical drives or array because a server or disk failure could wipe out both your database and your backup copy. For a large installation of SQL Servers, you would also probably have some type of centralized tape backup method. Both of these scenarios require the movement of backup files across your network.

To help handle the volume of data that needs to be written to disk and tape, you should have a separate management network to isolate this type of network traffic so it does not affect application users. Database files probably account for a good majority of your overall disk storage needs, so eliminating the movement of these files across your user network will ensure you are not impacting users and provide maximum file throughput to meet your backup needs.

Another hurdle with having a lot of servers is how to monitor them to confirm all jobs are successful. In addition to making sure backups run smoothly, you also need to monitor available disk space. It is practically impossible to connect to every server every day to check that all processes are running without issue, so you should implement some tools or processes to automate monitoring. The simplest and cheapest option is to set up SQL Server alerts and operators. You can use specific event codes to monitor backups and send messages to notify DBAs of errors. You may also use one of the many third-party monitoring tools available from companies including Idera, Quest Software, NetIQ Corp. and Microsoft. Some of these tools have been written specifically for SQL Server, while others are more generic in nature and cover all aspects of your server; some also offer auto correction for problems encountered.