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.
Category: Storage
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.