October 7, 2002 at 3:11 am
Hi,
First of all,
Thanks to the people behind this site.
Great job! Nice community.
I have a question please!
Is it possible to have SQL data + log files on SAN with suitable RAID and using Active/Passive or Active/Active nodes?
I need a soln for highly transactional (10M hits), 650 Gb write oriented db existing on Mainframes.
Many of You might be using even larger dbs. What type of clustering is better and which RAID is better? MS has two type os clustering and I am planning on Federated servers with Active/Passive clustering.
Is this doeable?
Any inputs are welcome.
My sincere thanks for your time and interest.
Rgds
Blue Sky
October 7, 2002 at 9:18 am
Not sure about using a SAN. I believe it will work, but we are using a SAN at my company for other servers and there are issues. Enough issues that I would be wary of sitting my database there.
IMHO, and I have not done this, but I would look to spread the load on multiple servers using Federated servers. Perhaps Brian will chime in, because I know he is using this on a smaller scale. If you need clustering that would work as well with the federated servers.
I'd open an RFP with Compaq, IBM, etc and try to get some lab time to see how feasable this is.
Steve Jones
October 7, 2002 at 9:51 am
I have seen a few postings here where people have put DBs on SANs and got mixed results. I think you need to have a very good infra-structure in place to get the performance improvements you'd expect. For example, the SAN should have true fibre connectivity.
With federations, yes it should work, if you know you're data architecture well enough. I had some consultancy meetings with Dell on this back in the spring, but it was never progressed. Issues with federations can be things like backup arrangements, and more importantly restores in the event of a DR invocation.
HTH,
Simon
(still looking for a job, lol)
October 7, 2002 at 10:49 am
Well, If you talk to compaq they won't support your cluster on anything but a san.
I would look at a couple of things regarding your setup on a san
One, will anyone else be using the san for file or data storage?
Two, can you afford enough disk to make a marked improvement in read and write speed?
Three, Do you have a solid server for this setup or do you need to look at setting up several servers as Steve suggested in a federated cluster?
Four, do you have enough network bandwith to handle this kind of setup. Alot of people build a good solid hardware foundation only to have the bottleneck be poor network planning.
You can setup an RFP with compaq pretty easy. If you talk to Dell tell the TSR you want to talk to people from their storage group and/or people in the Gold group that handle storage. Those are the guys who handle problems day to day and will be able to give you more of a real world feel for what is going on.
Cheers,
Wes
October 7, 2002 at 12:27 pm
With a little planning, and fiber connections only, I've seen it done in an active/active configuration and work well. Network bandwidth became the biggest issue, but was addressed by creating a dedicated backside network for the Sql Servers, seperate from the business interface.
October 8, 2002 at 11:40 am
For clustering a Fiber to a SAN is the best way, Cluster with SCSI to an external box is touchy.
There should be no real issue's with SAN versus local DASD in either case, the SANs are usually big RAID complexes and can handle a lot more I/O.
But the basic rules still apply to laying out the physical structure.
KlK, MCSE
KlK
October 9, 2002 at 11:02 pm
Thanks for all your feedback.
We are setting up the same using federated method on Hitachi 9900 V series here. We have taken in to account all the bandwidth and failover issues though yet to start!
Initially this will be for some 15 non-critical servers and I will update if there are any issues.
Thanks again for your suggestions and feedback
Cheers
Gopi
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