I ran across a tip on MSSQLTips from Joe Gavin recently, and it got me thinking about hardware and disks. For a lot of us, we deal with servers and storage, and not disks. While we might have a disk on a laptop or desktop, most of the production systems just attach to remote storage. In fact, outside of a portable drive in my bag and the SSDs on my desktop, I haven't actually seen a disk in years, spinning or other.

All the systems I connect to are remote, and I honestly would have no idea if the disks are local to the system or remote. I know that this can matter, and certainly impact performance. I just usually don't care. More and more often, I care about the actual performance in latency and IOPs.

Years ago I used to know the different RAID configurations, and I would sometimes specifically request them from storage people. Or I'd just set them up myself. That might seem strange to some people, but there was a time when I got a shipment of boxes and assembled a database server myself from pieces and parts before mounting it in a server room.

I wonder to what extent any of you care about physical hardware anymore. Perhaps you have a data center in your organization that is owned and managed. There might even be specifications you provide when a new database is needed that correspond to the storage configuration. Perhaps you just request a certain level of IOPs and latency performance. Maybe you have a standard for how databases are stored on disks.

Maybe you're like me and don't care. You just ask for a size and then give a thumbs up or thumbs down for the amount of performance. If things aren't running well, you let someone else figure out how to make them faster.

In some sense, this feels like I've abdicated some of my role as a database professional, but really, I don't care about individual specs. If I want to know if something is good, or fast, I ask friends who do care and just rely on their advice. In most cases, I just care about turning up or down the performance level, which is why I like the cloud. I can often just provision faster storage and pay more for that. Or go with slower performance and pay less. I like that I can make the decision.

This isn't to say the cloud is easy; I just don't care about the details. If I want something faster, I'll reach out to someone who focuses on the performance of that particular cloud platform and system and ask them.