SQL Server vs the SAN
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When a new physical server showed up in the past there was always a big debate with the the administrators of the machine, who set up the disks and installed Windows Server to their liking and the DBAs. The server admins set up all the disks as one giant RAID 5 and ignored the carefully selected number of disks that the DBAs wanted segmented to a variety of mirrors for the OS, tempdb, log files, and data files. The server admins always won by simply locking the physical server away in a rack in a locked server room and ignoring pleas to reconfigure it even though the DBAs were willing to do it themselves.
So now our new SQL Server is due to arrive early next year along with the organization's first SAN. Said SAN will be used for a lot of other servers as well, not just the SQL Server. So my question is, since SANs are supposed to be so great and fast, does the debate about individual disks go away? If we get a single logical block of space on the SAN, which is the easiest and therefore most likely thing that will happen, can we just dump all the various SS files into a giant disk D: (assuming C: is a pair of little disks for the OS and pagefile in the physical server)?
Our data warehouse is far beyond the point where quibbling disk performance details is an intellectual exercise. And the BI server is rapidly becoming a monster as well. Any pointers from SAN veterans is greatly appreciated, thanks!
Also any tips on how to break into a fingerprint access only server room and a key locked rack would help between now and when the SAN shows up.
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Speaking from a SAN/Cluster Administrator perspective, you still have to do the proper planning and deployment with respect to supporting databases, whether they be SQL Server or Exchange. A lot of this depends on how your SAN will be configured. The SAN we use, we have separate LUNs with separate disk sets for the various servers. However, it is possible in SANs newer than the one we're currently using to have the logical disk arrays.
As far as changing the mindset, I'd attack it from an education perspective. I understand your frustration with the fact that they create just 1 big RAID 5 and ignore the details you've put in. I sit on the infrastructure side now and had detailed requirements for one of our monitoring servers' data stores and saw my RAID 0+1 partititions all slammed together into a single RAID 5 one. Yeah, I was steaming mad, too. But after talking with the guy who set it up, he didn't understand why I had detailed the RAID 0+1 configuration and what it meant to a database server. We had to live with the misconfiguration, but in the future it won't be an issue because he now knows the impact. So it may not be that they are ignoring you just because they can, but because they don't understand. So you may be facing an education effort here. Once they understand the impact, they may change their ways.
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
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