Setting up a SAN for SQL Server

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Setting up a SAN for SQL Server

John R. Wuelzer

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May 17, 2007 at 3:42 pm

#178990

I used to have a white paper that described how/why of setting up a SAN that would have SQL Server databases and other things on it for best SQL performance - does anyone know where I can get it or any other documentation on the subject?

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alen teplitsky SSC-Dedicated Points: 30014 More actions · Answer 1

which SAN did you have in mind. we are playing with HP DL 380 G5 servers that have PCI express and 3gb I/O paths and they are fast. A SAN solution will have varying I/O speeds and you have to look at it and compare to what you can get on local hardware

John R. Wuelzer SSC-Addicted Points: 410 More actions · Answer 2

I don't have the model # but it's the newer version from Xiotech - 7.5T

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

if you have the budget get the fiber one. even though i've never used iSCSI, i don't trust it

Mike Metcalf SSCrazy Eights Points: 8763 More actions · Answer 4

I agree, I have no problem with iSCSI for Development or UAT servers, but prefer to stick with FC4 for production

alen teplitsky SSC-Dedicated Points: 30014 More actions · Answer 5

one thing i learned in the last few weeks

we bought a bunch of HP DL 380 G5 servers and they all run Windows 2003 R2 x64. Two are clustered in production and one is in QA. The QA server is attached to an EMC SAN to volumes we just configured from the last space available on it and new drives we just bought. the production volumes are on volumes we configured years ago.

Query performance is about the same. But on maintenance which is IO heavy the QA box is a lot faster. the Index fragmentation system view takes 30-45 minutes to run on one database. In production it takes over 2 hours on the same db with maybe 20% more data. and the QA box is slightly slower than production.

only thing we can think of is that the production disk volumes aren't configured for maximum performance

how you carve the SAN is extremely important

WesleyB Ten Centuries Points: 1307 More actions · Answer 6

I have a couple of points to remember on my blog.

There is a great blog series on the Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team Blog.

Sam-402080 Valued Member Points: 52 More actions · Answer 7

Try this...

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb331794.aspx

Regards

Sam

alen teplitsky SSC-Dedicated Points: 30014 More actions · Answer 8

thanks, i set up RAID 10 on a new server we just bought and so far it's pretty fast reading and writing at the same time