Production DBA
SAN Snapshot Smackdown
On Twitter, several SAN pros were saying their snapshots can pull off some nifty stuff. Well, it's time to find out just how true that is.
Let's say we have a data warehouse with:
Category: Hardware
Fusion-IO ioDrive Review
Solid state drives (SSDs) have gotten a lot of press because they can be dramatically faster than magnetic hard drives. They use flash memory instead of spinning magnetic platters. Since any bit of memory can be accessed at any time without moving a hard drive's head around, SSD random access is insanely fast. How fast…
How to Make a Dell PowerEdge Quieter
I've got a few servers in my home lab and I've always taken steps to make sure they're quiet. I like running my lab out of my office closet, but I don't want to hear any of them running. I've blogged about how to build a silent PC, but today I'm tackling another noisy beast - an off-the-rack server.
SQL University: Scary Storage Scenarios
In the final part of my SQL University serries, I talk about the nightmares of storage: why things change when we're not looking and why virtualization makes it harder to keep an eye on things.
SQL University: Where We Store Stuff
In part 2 of this series, I cover magnetic hard drives, solid state drives, and RAID arrays. I explain the pros and cons of each, and I discuss their relative speeds.
SQL University: The Basics of Storage
In part 1 of a multi-part series, I talk about what SQL Server stores, why your data and transaction files are usually best kept on separate drive arrays, and why cache doesn't always help.
SAN Multipathing Part 2: What Multipathing Does
Storage Area Networks (SANs) can do multipathing, but what does that really mean? I explain the differences between failover and performance load balancing, and talk about why active/active multipathing isn't what it seems.
SAN Multipathing Part 1: What are Paths?
In the beginning, God made drives directly attached to our computers. Over time, man decided to get jiggy with it and use Storage Area Networks. Learn why pathing is so important to these two systems.
New internal solid state drives are “world’s fastest storage”
I don't talk about hardware much here, but an SSD review hit Engadget this morning and made me take notice. Fusion-io gave their new 80gb ioDrive to TweakTown for a review, and - Wait, hang on. Don't close the browser yet. I know, everything about this post reeks of some tiny manufacturer with borked products…
SQLIO Tutorial: How to Test Disk Performance
Storage 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. It's time…
Steel Cage Blogmatch: How to Configure a SAN
Jason Massie and Brent Ozar work with SQL Server for a living and write blogs for fun, but that’s where the similarities end. Jason’s a fan of shared storage SANs: putting SQL Server data and logs on the same set of physical hard drives. Brent’s a cheerleader for dedicated configurations where the arrays are separated…
SQL Server on a SAN: Dedicated or Shared Drives?
A reader wrote in and asked: We're running SQL Server with blades and a NetApp SAN. We have a few hundred databases from 100mb to 200gb. All data, logs, tempdb, etc. are located in the same 30-disk pool. Apparently this was setup using NetApp's guidelines. NetApp recommendations are to put everything in one aggregate, or…
Ugly month of outages
The past month has been a real challenge, filled with 70-80 hour weeks and clawing back from one disaster after another.
In late June, IBM recommended that we upgrade the firmware on our DS4800 SAN controllers to fix some problems. We obliged, and two days later, our Exchange cluster rebooted without warning. We'd been having some other problems with those servers anyway, so we didn't connect the dots. A few days later, the reboot happened again, and then again.