October 17, 2002 at 10:40 pm
I'm relatively new to SQL Server with about a year of development and DBA experience, and I'm now faced with giving recommendations on the best setup for a production system on a Storage Area Network.
Have any of you had experience in this area and if so do you know of any good resources I can get my hands on (web, books etc) which may help me out?
I guess my basic aim is to ensure that I get the best performance in this environment in regard to the DB datafiles (including tempdb as it is used quite a bit).
Any hints or possible areas I can look would be much appreciated!
Thanks
Jim
October 18, 2002 at 8:00 am
Who is your hardware vendor for both your servers and the SAN itself?
K. Brian Kelley
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K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
October 18, 2002 at 9:24 am
We have a Compaq SAN for some other items, but not the dbs. I have spoken recently to MS on another issue, a server with fiber channel disks, and they mentioend this is essentially a SAN. They have some problems with SANs as databases, mainly because of network connectivity, so I'd look into this and perhaps have a separate backplane for servers only to reduce and network contention. We are also considering this for future DBs, and working with Compaq/HP, but the technology is still maturing.
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October 18, 2002 at 9:53 am
We have been running SQL Server in data center and database in Compaq SAN for two years. Initialiy, There were some problems in SAN and mostly related to the hardware, improper configuration and registry. By working with Compaq, most issues have been resloved with various patchs.
It is really not much difference using SAN for databases in our environment because the SAN is dedictaed to be used by one large database only.
October 19, 2002 at 12:40 am
We have recently went to an EMC SAN environment for our SQL Server 2000 development environment.
I want to start monitoring the IO's for this environment before it goes into production.
How many I/O's per second should I expect
here on the SAN?
Also, how much data does SQL Server 2000 write or read per single I/O?
Does it read ahead? How much data?
Thanks.
October 19, 2002 at 12:57 am
I mean physical I/O's here.
October 20, 2002 at 5:44 pm
Brian Kelley ...
Hardware vendor for the SAN is DELL and the servers are DELL Power Edges (model 2650).
It will be difficult for us to do heaps of preliminary testing and thats why I'm asking questions here because I don't have the luxury of having a play on the system. Of course there will be some testing but since the client is very remote its better I go as best prepared as I can. We develop everything off-site and deploy on-site. There is no DBA on-site for now so I'm doing that remotely too (via scripts send by email to IT dep and they sent back results - very old card-mainframe like programming environment!).
Thanks for the responses ... Any further issues (limitations, advantages etc) you may have experienced with DBs on a SAN would be greatly appreciated too!!
Cheers
Jim
October 20, 2002 at 11:50 pm
The DELL SAN is just the low-end EMC SAN gear that they bought acquired when they bought Clariion... not bad stuff but not the high-end stuff either.
When configuring your LUN's on the array you should do RAID 1+0 (stripped mirror sets) for your database and your transaction logs. Use different LUNS for each. You can then create another LUN for backups if you are not going direct to tape.. we use RAID 5 for this as performance is not such huge factor.
We are using Compaq (HP) HSG80 and EVA sans... have about 18TB of raw capacity mostly for SQL clustering and it works great. The HSG80's do about 22,000 IOPS while the EVA does about 672K IOPS... and we have seen enormous speed improvements when using it... upwards of 500% speed improvement on large OLAP cube building.
October 21, 2002 at 10:15 am
should the logs be on a mirrored-only drives? No striping.
Since log are sequential writes.
October 22, 2002 at 6:10 pm
quote:
The DELL SAN is just the low-end EMC SAN gear that they bought acquired when they bought Clariion... not bad stuff but not the high-end stuff either.When configuring your LUN's on the array you should do RAID 1+0 (stripped mirror sets) for your database and your transaction logs. Use different LUNS for each. You can then create another LUN for backups if you are not going direct to tape.. we use RAID 5 for this as performance is not such huge factor.
We are using Compaq (HP) HSG80 and EVA sans... have about 18TB of raw capacity mostly for SQL clustering and it works great. The HSG80's do about 22,000 IOPS while the EVA does about 672K IOPS... and we have seen enormous speed improvements when using it... upwards of 500% speed improvement on large OLAP cube building.
October 22, 2002 at 6:27 pm
quote:
The DELL SAN is just the low-end EMC SAN gear that they bought acquired when they bought Clariion... not bad stuff but not the high-end stuff either.When configuring your LUN's on the array you should do RAID 1+0 (stripped mirror sets) for your database and your transaction logs. Use different LUNS for each. You can then create another LUN for backups if you are not going direct to tape.. we use RAID 5 for this as performance is not such huge factor.
We are using Compaq (HP) HSG80 and EVA sans... have about 18TB of raw capacity mostly for SQL clustering and it works great. The HSG80's do about 22,000 IOPS while the EVA does about 672K IOPS... and we have seen enormous speed improvements when using it... upwards of 500% speed improvement on large OLAP cube building.
Very happy to hear about the performance you are getting out of the Compaq EVA.
We are deployingg a EVA in support of a SAP portal with SQL and I was wondering what do you consider the key indicators are in monitoring both the EVA and the switch fabric. Our NewHP consultant suggests that if the fabric is congested then you obviously have a problem. Do we need to watch the EVA, in our case we will also be running small SAP BW/CRM on the EVA as well.
Regards, Brian
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