Is the SAN dying? The reason that I ask this question is that MSFT has unleashed technologies this year that point in that directionAlways ON Availability Groups shuns shared storageWindows 2012 has Storage Replication Technology that does not require a SANWindows 2012 has Hyper-V Replica Technology that does not require a SANPDW v2 continues to ...

“Storage is just like gasoline,” said a fellow DBA at the office the other day. This DBA, Mike is his name, is one of the smartest people I know, so I pressed him, in my subtle and erudite way, to elaborate. “Um, whut?” I said. “Yeah. Now that everything is shared – VMs or consolidated SQL Servers and shared storage – if you want to do a big ...

This is part II of two Scandalous posts. Watch, mouth agape, as I run with scissors, right up against prevailing wisdom! Unfollow me now, before it’s too late! Here’s the thing. There are two really outstanding posts out there on the ‘tubez that explain in vivid detail the problems with sending compressed data into a de-duplicating appliance. And ...

A contribution for T-SQL Tuesday #004, hosted by the illustrious Mike Walsh! In the past few weeks I had some correspondence with Kendal Van Dyke leading up to his SQL Saturday presentation on SSDs, and he got me fired up to share a little of my team’s experience with a real implementation. Over the past four months or so, our IT group at work ...

As will become apparent from this post, I am no Storage Admin. My apologies for offending the sensibilities of those who know this topic better than I do! I get asked occasionally about placing SQL Server data on SAN storage, and I've done it with a few systems, and a lot of smart people helping me, so here's a SAN 101 crib sheet for DBAs ...

Lately I'm faced with a fairly ambitious data center move, and at the same time with an initiative to consolidate sprawling SQL Servers onto centralized clusters. It's a chunk of work, but these two notions have fit together pretty well: as long as we're moving SQL services and touching everything, it seems to be easier to make the consolidation ...

I'd like to pass along a couple of tips for those new to using SAN storage for SQL Server. SAN Storage is quite expensive, and doubly so if your storage doesn't deliver on the performance front. SAN disk arrays are not magic, and sadly they don't just automagically perform well, marketing to the contrary. These are some items I have found helpful ...

In the SQL Server communities, it's common to hear people talking about HP SAN, EMC SAN, 3Par SAN, and so on as if there were such things as HP SAN, EMC SAN, etc. Technically, SAN stands for Storage Area Network, but can be, and has been, used in two different ways. First, outside the storage communities, people often view everything beyond ...

SQL Server workloads   So far, the discussions in all the previous posts (1, 2, 3, and 4) on the performance impact of file fragmentation on a drive presented from a high-end enterprise-class disk array are related to disk I/O workloads. Ultimately, you want to know how file fragmentation may impact your SQL Server workloads.   In ...

Lies, damned lies, and statistics!   If you have read my three previous posts (1, 2, 3), you may walk away with an impression that on a drive presented from a high-end enterprise class disk array, Windows file fragmentation does not have a significant performance impact. And I’ve given you empirical data—oh yeah, statistics—to support that ...