SQL Server 2016 Enterprise 2 Core with Software Assurance

Each Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Open License provides licensing for 2 server cores, and require a MINIMUM of 4 Cores to be licensed. Being compliant with Microsoft requires at least 2 open licenses to be purchased, even if your machine has less than 4 cores.

The newest addition from Microsoft, SQL Server 2016 leads innovation with the latest in enterprise technologies and operating system capabilities that fully support maximum memory and core count allowed by Windows Server. This is especially useful for large-scale data warehousing, where massive symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) scale and terabytes of memory are the keys to optimizing performance.

Providing an easy and cost-effective way to improve decision making and business processes, Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Enterprise offers you and your organization many benefits and capabilities. It provides mission-critical performance by accelerating critical applications with a new in-memory OLTP engine that can deliver substantial performance gains. SQL Server 2016 Enterprise provides faster insights on any data and is also the most secure database you will find. It's been designed specifically to work in a hybrid environment spanning your premises and the cloud.

Benefits

SQL Server 2016 makes it easier and more cost-effective to build high-performance, mission-critical applications, enterprise-ready Big Data assets, and BI solutions that help employees make better decisions, faster. These solutions have the flexibility of being deployed on-premises, in the cloud or in a hybrid environment, and can be managed through a common and familiar tool set.

• Mission-critical performance: SQL Server 2016 accelerates reliable, mission-critical applications with a new in-memory OLTP engine that can deliver on average 10x, and up to 30x transactional performance gains. For Data Warehousing, the new updatable in-memory column store can query 100x faster than legacy solutions. SQL Server also delivers peace of mind as the most secure database five years in a row. (National Institute of Standards and Technology Comprehensive Vulnerability Database 4/17/2013, Market share from IDC 2013)
• Faster insights on any data: Get to insights faster with a complete BI platform that speeds up how you access, analyze, clean, and shape both internal and external data. With SQL Server 2016 and Power BI for Office 365, it is easy to connect every user in an organization to the right data they need to make better decisions, faster.
• Platform for hybrid cloud: SQL Server 2016 was designed to work in a hybrid environment that spans on-premises and the cloud and has new tools that make it even easier to build back-up and disaster recovery solutions with Microsoft Azure. These tools provide an easy on-ramp to the cloud for on-premises SQL Server databases, enabling customers to use their existing skills to take advantage of Microsoft's global datacenters.
• Breakthrough, in-memory performance: With SQL Server 2016, new in-memory capabilities for transaction processing and enhancements for data warehousing complement our existing technologies for data warehousing and analytics. Scale and transform your business with, on average, a 10x performance gain for transaction processing while still using existing hardware, and a greater-than 100x performance gain for data warehousing.
• Proven, predictable performance: SQL Server consistently leads in TPC-E, TPC-H, and real-world application performance benchmarks. SQL Server is SAP-certified to run some of the most demanding workloads. Get the more predictable performance of virtualized SQL Server instances with IO governance in Resource Governor.
• High availability and disaster recovery: Gain greater uptime, faster failover, improved manageability, and better use of hardware resources through AlwaysOn, a unified solution for high availability.

These are the minimum system requirements for installing SQL Server 2016 Enterprise 2 Core with Software Assurance:

• Processor: 1.4 GHz
• Memory: 512 MB for Express, 1 GB for Standard
• Disk Space: 6 GB