SQL on SAN or Local Disk????

Question

Post reply

SQL on SAN or Local Disk????

aabraham

SSC Enthusiast

Points: 104
More actions
March 4, 2008 at 9:50 pm

#203827

Hi

Im looking at building brand new SQL 2005 infrastructure for our company. Looking at clustering SQL 2005 on Proliant DL580 hardware with Windows 2003. Im in 2 minds as to whether I should host SQL on our SAN or on local disk. Are there any whitepapers / best practice documents on whether its preferable to host SQL on local disk or SAN. I would be interested to see performance comparisons also on this matter.

Any assistance appreciated..

Thanks

Anthony

Viewing 9 posts - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply

Matt Miller (4) SSC Guru Points: 124210 More actions · Answer 1

If you're planning on clustering - then traditional "local disks" aren't going to be an option. At very least you are going to need some way to share the disks between the two servers. That being said - there are some custom RAID enclosures that allow for something like that (it's a pseudo NAS solution, which allows for "shared ownership" of the disks.) The most common way however to do Clustering is to leverage a SAN solution, since it tends to be the high-end/high-performance way to do this.

Depending on your circumstances - if you wish to stay with local disks - you may need to investigate other solutions, like database mirroring instead of clustering.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?

Tommy Bollhofer SSChampion Points: 14940 More actions · Answer 2

Tommy Bollhofer

SSChampion

Points: 14940

March 5, 2008 at 8:01 am

#785503

Generally speaking a SAN will offer you better performance (more spindles). I would recommend using SQLIOSim to benchmark performance. More information available at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/231619

Tommy

Follow @sqlscribe

alen teplitsky SSC-Dedicated Points: 30014 More actions · Answer 3

alen teplitsky

SSC-Dedicated

Points: 30014

March 5, 2008 at 9:09 am

#785562

why DL 580's unless you need more than 32GB of RAM?

if you wait, i'm pretty sure the DL 380 G6's will be released soon and they should go higher than 32GB of RAM. we bought our first G5's right around a year ago and they were brand new back then

TheSQLGuru SSC Guru Points: 134017 More actions · Answer 4

1) SANS can and do get built with very few spindles (stupidly).

2) SQLIOSIM is for read-write validation as opposed to true benchmarking. For that you should use SQLIO or IOMeter.

3) IIRC you can cluster DLs on top of MSA and other drive systems that aren't true SANs.

Best,
Kevin G. Boles
SQL Server Consultant
SQL MVP 2007-2012
TheSQLGuru on googles mail service

aabraham SSC Enthusiast Points: 104 More actions · Answer 5

aabraham

SSC Enthusiast

Points: 104

March 6, 2008 at 2:36 pm

#786360

Does anyone have any documents on tuning / building SQL clusters??

Thanks

TheSQLGuru SSC Guru Points: 134017 More actions · Answer 6

You actually need TWO documents. First is on cluster setup/install/tuning. I believe you can find a very fine example on this sight, written by Brad McGehee?? A web search will provide help too.

The other document is on how to tune SAN's for SQL Server. Linchi Shea is a help here. Microsoft has a nice document on physical I/O tuning and setup as well. But LOTS of stuff related to SAN configuration isn't out there, at least in a cohesive manner, that I have seen. There are many issues and decisions to deal with here. Find yourself a good consultant (colin Leversuch-Roberts on this site for example - I know he is good but don't know if he does consulting) and you will reap wonderful ROI from the SAN investment. Without one you probably won't get anywhere near optimal performance.

Best,
Kevin G. Boles
SQL Server Consultant
SQL MVP 2007-2012
TheSQLGuru on googles mail service

Robert.concepcion SSC Enthusiast Points: 194 More actions · Answer 7

I have done 3 project like this allready. It can be a nightmare.

Your SAN, NAS, DAS vender will work with you to spec out the storage.

They will base line the system with you. The Disk IO, Latency, Bytes Transfered. Response Time. Then there is memory Sizing. The more cache the less reads on the Storage system.

Amount of Processors.

But back to storage. Here is what you should ask your self. SAN or DAS will you have to share the spindles or will they be own by the database only. 2 question. If I set up a raid 10 with ten disk and 6 month later workload increases And I choose not to use table space concept(filegroups) what solution will let me add more disk to my raid set and do this with out a total rebuild.

Also performance tune the db as much as possible. Alot of problems are a lack of SQl maintence.

Dell and HP have good reference models.

http://www.dell.com/sql

http://www.hp.com

http://h71019.www7.hp.com/ActiveAnswers/cache/70728-0-0-0-121.html#100