September 1, 2005 at 1:35 pm
We have a project that has a temporary need for 1 TB of space on a server. A higher up manager threw out the idea of using a NAS to provide a low cost additional amount of space. We currently use SAN and Local Disk, but don't have enough SAN available to meet the requirement. Has anyone used NAS successfully/not successfully? Any other recommendations? Thanks!
September 2, 2005 at 7:06 am
I was going to reply that Microsoft SQL Server does not support running databases on NAS or network storage devices. That was the case for a long time. I went to Microsoft's SQL website to find the page that supported that, and was surprised that they now do support it, but under some strict conditions (and you have to modify SQL server to do so). See INF: Support for Network Database Files at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;304261 for the details and how to make it work, and a link to a list of qualified devices.
Hope this helps.
Mark
September 2, 2005 at 7:20 am
Thank you for the information, that is exactly the detail I needed to take back to our management and hopefully steer them back to ordering more drives for the server.
September 2, 2005 at 7:59 am
I just wanted to add that we had tried using NAS in the past and we were disappointed but things have changed. Because of the changes, we are in the early part of a transition to move our data back to NAS servers.
NAS has changed so that you can now use an iSCSI or FibreChannel connection and sometimes get better performance than local disks.
Also, the change to SQL Server that mhar mentioned is not necessarily true anymore. You can now build a volume on a NAS server and map it as a local drive on your SQL Server and SQL Server doesn't know any difference.
Go to the netapps site http://www.netapps.com/ (this is the kind of NAS we are using) and you can find a lot of information about NAS and SQL Server. Contact them and they can give you more information.
Good luck!
hawg
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