June 8, 2004 at 8:33 am
We are an association
of 35,000 members.
Our company has 25 employees.
We have 5 Windows 2000 servers.
All our data that needs to be backed up is about 80-90 GB.
IT Mangement came up with an idea that we need to implement
SAN (Storage Area Network) solution. Dell and TELUS are going to do the implementation for $110,000 CAD.
I'm afraid it's an overkill for our small office.
But in order to have grounds to say that
I need to communicate this affectively to the management.
Can anybody share his experience with SAN
and give me some advise on whether it is a good thing
or maybe it's not for us?
Thanks,
June 8, 2004 at 9:00 am
A SAN is definately a good thing (in my experience), however I would be inclined to agree with you that it's overkill for your environment.
You don't mention if you are clustering SQL, are logshipping, will be using a remote san for redundancy or the raid version that you'll be using on the san, or how transactional it is.
Things to bear in mind...the san is just another piece of hardware to go wrong, the administration of a san can be a time consuming task, and it's a whole other level of knowledge that would go into administering it. The cost per Gb on a san (should you need to add more disk going forward) is very expensive.
You would probably be better off working with redundant raid arrays attached locally to each SQL server (you mention 5 servers, are they all SQL), certainly it would keep the initial and ongoing costs a lot lower. You would also get the benefit that the administration would be considerably easier and configuring the raid correctly will allow you to swap failed disks out yourself without having to wait for a specialised engineer to come along.
June 8, 2004 at 9:41 am
Correction.
We have:
2 PDC servers
2 Citrix Servers
1 Exchange 5.5
4 SQL Server 2000
1 data server
1 print server
1 development Windows 2000 server (for testing web applications)
All are Windows 2000 servers,except one - Windows NT server.
June 8, 2004 at 9:46 am
Are your SQL server clustered and all production?
June 8, 2004 at 9:49 am
No.
Our SQL Servers are not clustered.
And 2 or 3 SQL Servers are production.
June 8, 2004 at 9:59 am
As you are not clustering I really don't see the need for a SAN. I'd stick with external arrays, you'd save yourself more than 50%, and then you could persuade them to give you a pay rise for saving them such big bucks.
June 9, 2004 at 8:59 am
For what purpose is the backup to disk? Most backups are to tape. The biggest two reasons for backing up to disk are 1. because this is the fastest way to backup SQL Server and free up SQL Server resources for database processing, and 2. to allow a "hot" backup that can be accessed more quickly than tape.
For your situation, you may also want to consider NAS (Network Attached Storage), if you need "hot" backups. If you do not need hot backups and have enough disk space on the SQL Servers to do the data dumps, then back the dumps to tape, you can get away without SAN or NAS.
In some cases SAN makes more sense because you can actually store your database files on it (including the Exchange DB files) and the OS of the SAN takes care of snapshotting the data, allowing you to not need to do specific backups of the SQL databases or the Exchange DB files. You'd still want to back the files to tape for off site storage, but you could do your backups directly from the "hot" backups the SAN provides for you automatically.
I have used NAS for storage of DB files and do not recommend it except as a last resort. This is because, while it does provide the "hot" backup like the SAN, all traffic must go through the network stack to get to the NAS, creating more overhead than a fiber channel connection to a SAN device. In our environment we have run into situations where the NAS device could not handle all of the network traffic due to the large number of server talking to it on that NIC, even though it is a GB segment. In your small environment you will probably not see this sort of problem, but the performance will still not be as great as SAN.
If you want to use NAS for a backup device/ file storage device to offload the backup traffic (have the tape drive(s) connected to the NAS device and backup all servers to the NAS device across the LAN), this would have pretty good performance.
Chris
June 9, 2004 at 9:03 am
NAS.
Never heard of it.
Where I can read more about it?
June 9, 2004 at 9:09 am
Network Appliance is our NAS vendor. They also do SAN, it just depends on the controller(s) used in the device.
http://www.netapp.com/solutions/nas.html
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci214410,00.html
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid5_gci916335,00.html
Chris
June 9, 2004 at 9:11 am
Thanks Chris,
Reading time...
June 9, 2004 at 1:48 pm
It does sound like overkill I am not sure why they would recommend a SAN solution for 80-90GB of data. I don't think I would even recommend an external array solution either. Unless you are dealing with large amounts of data an external array is just one more potential area of failure. I would recommend going with a 2 servers that have 500GB of internal storage. Use one as your primary box and log ship SQL to the secondary box for redundancy. That would reduce the amount of boxes needed, allow for fail over, provide room to grow, and cost almost half of the proposed SAN solution.
This is of course coming from someone who is biased. I went through a major SAN failure that lasted several days. The support provided by the vendor was not what was expected.
June 9, 2004 at 1:52 pm
EMC SAN huh?
June 9, 2004 at 2:47 pm
I agree with Corbin regarding SAN failures. We didn't have any outage in the first one year but have had over 6 outages in the last one year. They were each for about 5-10 hrs. and it has many components where it can fail at.
June 15, 2004 at 12:09 am
For God's sake, DO NOT use a NAS with SQL Server. You are asking for nothing but trouble. Even Microsoft does not recommend it. I've used Network Appliance NAS and EMC and CLARIION SAN's as well as Raid Arrays, and I'm telling you NAS is bad news. It was never designed to service Databases and it just does not work.
I think in your case, like a lot of people have already posted, a SAN would be overkill. I have several databases >100 GB and we have them running on multiple RAID arrays with no problem.
My advice, whatever the vendors tell you double and triple check the facts. NAS and SAN vendors always try to tell you that their product will do this and that but most of the time the Sales guys are talking through their *&#*@ and a lot of the time the concept they are talking about is Oracle based not SQL Server. Not trying to scare you, but make certain you have all the facts, SANs are not cheap.
Good luck,
Angela
June 15, 2004 at 9:11 am
We have several production SQL Servers in our environment. We used SAN for years because it was "The Enterprise Disk Solution." We had many outages related to the complexity of SAN. Everything from pulled fiber cables, to something going wrong at the switch, to somthing going wrong inside the frame.
We finally got tired of it, and made a case for moving from SAN to 15K RPM Internal drives in our Compaq Proliant DL380s. We trust our O/S to be on internal drives, why can we not trust SQL Server to be there as well?
Our largest database is about 15GB. The internal disk works like a champ. Performance tests actually indicated that internal performs better than SAN for us in our environment. I would not want that SAN headache again for anything. Not to mention the cost difference....
Best of luck
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