caps.latest.revision: 19

author: BarbKess

The loading server:

- Does not have to be a single server. You can load concurrently with multiple loading servers.

- Is located in your own non-appliance rack, and cannot be placed within the Analytics Platform System appliance.

- Is connected to the appliance through the Appliance InfiniBand network, or over Ethernet. For performance, we recommend using InfiniBand.

- Is in your own customer domain, not the appliance domain. There is no trust relationship between your customer domain and the appliance domain.

Now that you better understand your capacity requirements, you can plan the servers and networking components that you will need to purchase or provision. Incorporate the following list of requirements into your purchasing plan, and then purchase your server or provision an existing server.

The server must use the EN-US locale in order to use the dwloader Command-Line Loading tool. dwloader does not support other locales.

To prepare for a Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2012 R2 InfiniBand connection:

3. Purchase 2 FDR InfiniBand cables for a dual port card, or 1 FDR InfiniBand cable for a single port card. The FDR InfiniBand cables will connect the loading server to the appliance InfiniBand network. The cable length depends on the distance between the loading server and the appliance InfiniBand switches, according to your environment.

Use these steps to connect the loading server to the InfiniBand network. If the server is not using the InfiniBand network, skip this step.

1. Rack the server close enough to the appliance so that you can connect it to the appliance InfiniBand network.

- InfiniBand drivers for Windows are developed by the OpenFabrics Alliance, an industry consortium of InfiniBand vendors. The correct driver may have been distributed with your InfiniBand network adapter. If not, the driver can be downloaded from www.openfabrics.org.

You are now ready to start loading data. For more information, see:

For best loading performance on Windows Server 2012 and beyond, turn on Instant File Initialization so that when data is overwritten, the operating system will not overwrite existing data with zeros. If this is a security risk because prior data still exists on the disks, then be sure to turn Instant File Initialization off.

To reduce security risks with your data, we advise the following:

- Operations on the loading server can accept an UNC path from which to pull data from outside the trusted internal network. And an attacker on the network or with ability to influence name resolution can intercept or modify data sent to the SQL Server PDW. This presents a tampering and information disclosure risk. Tampering should be mitigated by requiring signing on the connection. To help mitigate this risk, set the following group policy option in **Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options** on the loading server: **Microsoft network client: Digitally sign communications (always): Enabled**

- Turn off Instant File Initialization on Windows Server 2012 and beyond. This is a tradeoff between performance and security, as noted in the Performance section. You need to decide what is best according to your security requirements.

To load data, you need one or more loading servers. You can use your own existing ETL or other servers, or you can purchase new servers. For more information, see [Acquire and configure a loading server](media/acquire-and-configure-loading-server.md). These instructions include a [Loading server capacity planning worksheet](loading-server-capacity-planning-worksheet.md) to help you plan the right solution for loading.

A PDW database backup is created with the [BACKUP DATABASE](https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/mt631607.aspx) t-sql statement and formatted for use with the [RESTORE DATABASE](https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/mt631612.aspx) statement; it is unusable for any other purpose. The backup can only be restored to an appliance with the same number or a greater number of Compute nodes.

PDW uses SQL Server backup technology to backup and restore appliance databases. SQL Server backup options are preconfigured to use backup compression. You cannot set backup options such as compression, checksum, block size, and buffer count.

Database backups are stored on one or more backup servers, which exist in your own customer network. PDW writes a user database backup in parallel directly from the Compute nodes to one backup server and restores a user database backup in parallel directly from the backup server to the Compute nodes.

There are two types of data that require a backup: user databases and system databases (e.g., the master database). PDW does not backup the transaction log.

The following diagram shows the flow of data during a database restore.

|Backup and Restore Task|Description|

|---------------------------|---------------|

|Prepare a server as a backup server.|[Acquire and configure a backup server ](acquire-and-configure-backup-server.md)|

|Backup a database.|[BACKUP DATABASE](https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/mt631607.aspx)|

|Restore a database.|[RESTORE DATABASE](https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/mt631612.aspx)|

|Restore the master database.|To restore the master database, use the [Restore the master database](configuration-manager-restore-master-database.md) page in the Configuration Manager tool.|