SSWUGtv
With Stephen Wynkoop
In this episode: Avoiding surprises with your SQL Server configuration… who is changing what? Raj Sabhlok of ManageEngine on the show to talk about more holistic monitoring of your servers, plus Laura Rose with time management tips.
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The Devil is in the Details
In response to our editorial yesterday I received the following response from Rick regarding SAN Configuration.
I find that ‘finding’ clear or useful information on provisioning a SAN for use with SQL server very difficult.
It is good to know that in your case, your SQL was able to maintain good performance, etc.
Surely, the "devil is in the details" when it comes to using a SAN for active files vs. archive storage.
In the case you have input to the configuration of a SAN there are definitely a number of options that become available to you when it comes to dealing with Archive storage. The central question to archival storage is how quick does access to Archive data need to be? There may be more than one answer to this question.
For example, a compressed backup may be acceptable for data older than 1 week, but archive data less than 1 week may be required to be online. Even then there may be different acceptable levels of performance for online archived data.
Many SAN machines support JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) configurations. A JBOD is created with large, slower disks, generally in a less performant RAID configuration such as RAID 5. If loss is acceptable, they may even be configured as a striped set with no parity.
Archive data is then mounted on the JBOD disk volumes instead of your higher performing data volumes. For online archived tables the data may still be accessed, but performance will be slower than on the more expensive optimized drive configurations.
JBOD drives are often less expensive allowing for storage of database backups. The backups may be stored in a compressed form to conserver space as well. If not compressed, the archived backups may be restored for consumption, or even mounted using third party tools allowing you to access a database backup as you would a mounted database.
On the other side of the equation is the configuration for your real time database files. Even then there are a number of configurations I’ll drill into tomorrow.
We have a great episode with lots of advice from Denny Cherry who is a true guru when it comes to SAN configuration. Check it out for further details. You can click here to take you to the Media center at SSWUG. Then enter Denny Cherry in the Search Box at the top of the page and click GO. There are two great SSWUGtv episodes with Denny.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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