Optimal SSD drive configuration for DW server? Beneficial to keep ODS and DW in separate logical drives?

  • hi all,

    I am planning to upgrade / reconfigure my BI / DW servers, and I want to vet it with all the experts here.

    I am planning to upgrade all my HDD to SSD in my servers, I will probably mimic my current set up.

    Current setup. 2 servers. 1 for ODS (model like source data) and DW (dimensional models)

    1 server for SSAS

    For the ODS/DW server, I set up 5 logical drives

    C: OS drive

    D: Data drive for ODS

    E: Data drive for DW

    F: Data drive for other smaller DW

    G: Log drive

    I kept the drive for ODS and DW separate as there's a lot of reading from ODS and writing to DW concurrently in the ETL, so hopefully this reduce HDD / spindle contention

    However.. now that I am upgrading to SSD.. i am thinking if this even matters... I am not sure if ETL would be faster now if I keep ODS and DW as separate drives? Or it would be faster if I have a bigger drive and put it all together??

    How many parallel operations can I really have in SSD? If that's high, maybe keeping it in the same drive would be faster?? as that eliminates data transfer between the physical drives.. even though it's on a SATA 6 bus.

    Any other considerations I should think of when i upgrade?

    thanks!!!

  • I can't answer your questions, but Paul Randal wrote about them some today on TechNet (scroll down on the site to the "Reduce I/O, Increase Performance" section): (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh334997.aspx)

    The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Stephen Hawking

  • It all depends of how hard you hit ODS tables.

    In my particular experience ODS tables are heavily hit during a very short window therefore in such an scenario reserving a particular spin for ODS tables will be a waste of I/O capacity since the particular spin will sit idle for most of the day.

    _____________________________________
    Pablo (Paul) Berzukov

    Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.

    Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.

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