The SAN is a black box, right?
The SAN admins ask how much storage space you need, you tell them, and then they give it to you.
They don’t tell you how fast (or slow) it is, they don’t know whether it meets your needs, and they probably don’t know where the bottlenecks are.
And it’s not their fault - it’s yours, Mr. or Ms. Database Administrator.
You have all of the tools you need to find out how fast the storage is without any help from them. It’s a completely free tool - from Microsoft, no less. The tool is SQLIO.
The problem is that SQLIO is nowhere near easy to use. I love Linchi Shea’s blog about SQL Server storage performance, but there aren’t many of us who will read blog posts like this one about parsing SQLIO.exe output.
I’ve got the answer. In the upcoming SSWUG SQL Server Virtual Conference, I’m doing a session called Finding Your Storage Bottlenecks with SQLIO. I’ll make it very easy to run SQLIO, interpret the results, and work with the SAN team to make your database server run faster without spending more money. Well, you will have to spend $100 - that’s how much it costs for the SSWUG virtual conference, but there’s no travel required, and you’ll be able to attend more sessions than just mine. I gotta tell ya - I learned how to use SQLIO the hard way, and that knowledge alone is worth the hundred bucks to avoid!
