Best Practice on Data Warehouse Environments

When growing in Data Warehousing on of the most asked questions by infrastructure is what is the best practice on how many environments must be running?

Some assumptions that is made that in the Medium and Big Environments there is also a DR (Disaster Recover) in place.

Each organisation is different in regards to budget and user needs the following is recommendations of most common environments:

Small / New Environment:

In a small or new environment it is best to have only the production server separated, as the cost are then kept at a minimum and UAT deployment can happen a lot quicker. When using this environment please ensure that the following is kept:

Job runs:  Jobs should be disabled in DEV/UAT and only run when user request, else is can slow down the whole environment.
Backups: Backups should only be run on the Development Projects (Daily) and Production (Daily)
Syncing: Once a project moves to Production the Development and UAT instances must be deleted from  the environment, if there is any changes the production project must be copied over and used.

Medium / Mature Environment:

Job runs:  Jobs should be disabled in DEV. QA can have a 3 instance run to test while in UAT phase, after this is Must be disabled.
Backups: Backups should run on the DEV (Daily), UAT (Monthly) and Production (Daily)
Syncing: Once a project moves to Production the Development instances must be deleted from  the environment, if there is any changes the production project must be copied over and used, from here normal process follows, the UAT should not be deleted as this is use to test the changes does not have an project version impact.

Big / High Performance Environment:

This environment is used for critical Data Warehouse system that can have big impacts on business. They are also very expensive, but very stable in the long run.

Job runs:  Jobs should be disabled in DEV. QA can have a 3 instance run to test while in UAT phase, after this is Must be disabled. PRE-PROD should have the same run as PROD. This is to ensure environment as a whole testing impact before it goes into PROD.
Backups: Backups should run on the DEV (Daily), UAT (Monthly), PRE-PROD (Montly) and Production (Daily)
Syncing: Once a project moves to Production the Development instances must be deleted from  the environment, if there is any changes the production project must be copied over and used, from here normal process follows, the UAT should not be deleted as this is use to test the changes does not have an project version impact. The PRE-PROD is used for full environment impact.