High Performance/High Availability SAN config.. Old Skool vs. New School Question..

From: Larry Kippenhan (LWKNOSPAM_at_att.net)
Date: 07/07/04 

Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 09:20:47 -0700

Well, the time has finally come to upgrade the old SQL Server and SAN.

So, as I seek out all of the appropriate vendors for my Disk and Server
needs, I start to get some information about disks (SAN) that totally flies
in the face of experience.

I come from a mixed background of SQL Server and Oracle, and I feel that I
am pretty on top of things as far as how to configure the disks to get the
most out of my IO.

The issue that seems to be troubling me the most is the SAN vendors that are
claiming that I can have one big Disk Group, and put my Data file groups,
and my Index file groups on different LUNs on the same Disk Group
(essentially sharing Data and Index on the same disks). It even sounds like
they are advocating throwing TempDB there as well. I fully understand that
disks are faster, and controllers are more efficient and all that compared
to even 5 years ago, but I can't quite swallow that...

If what they are saying is true, then I may as well re-integrate my index
filegroup back into the data filegroup and forget segregating the loads.

I should also mention that they are at least advocating keeping the random
IO and the sequential IO on separate Disk Groups.

Does anyone have any recent experience with the newer, large SAN configs,
and experienced the same questions recently?

Just to give you an idea of the scale, the original 3 year growth config
included about 120 disks to be configured to keep performance maxxed for IO.
Of course I will be using RAID 10 for just about everything (except dumps,
they will be raid 5).

On a side note, I did almost have to reach through the phone and strangle
the life out of some storage Guru who mentioned that I could consider RAID 5
for my data.... Fortunately for him I was unable to accomplish that..

Thanks again everyone.

Please respond to this forum.

Thank you very much.

Larry

Relevant Pages

  • Re: High Performance/High Availability SAN config.. Old Skool vs. New School Question..
    ... Several manufacturers will have multiple vendors. ... I support the Professional Association for SQL Server ... > understand selling a SAN for storage consolidation with LOTS of front-end ... >> am pretty on top of things as far as how to configure the disks to get ...
    (microsoft.public.sqlserver.setup)
  • Re: High Performance/High Availability SAN config.. Old Skool vs. New School Question..
    ... the time has finally come to upgrade the old SQL Server and SAN. ... > am pretty on top of things as far as how to configure the disks to get the ... > and my Index file groups on different LUNs on the same Disk Group ...
    (microsoft.public.sqlserver.setup)
  • Re: Need experiences regarding booting from SAN
    ... I have a 7026-M80 that I am using SAN boot disks on. ... The storage is a FastT700. ... Need experiences regarding booting from SAN ...
    (AIX-L)
  • [HPADM] SUMMARY EMC SAN move (update)
    ... I guess I left out the part where EMC will be doing the SAN copy and the other necessary step on the SAN. ... assign the new disks and mirror to those disks and then break mirror, ... While the copy is going on, we edit the import scripts we ...
    (HP-UX-Admin)
  • disk speed (rpm)
    ... the servers use local hard disks to boot but are attached to ... now I noticed that the local sas disks are 15k rpm fast, ... disk hosted on the san only is 5k fast. ... better to use local disks for our sql server (the databases are used ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.general)
Quantcast