SAN drive for SQL

[Joe]

Is there a general concensus on using enterprise SAN for the WSS/
project server databases?

Could we use a two-node clustered SQL machines to I/O to data on the
SAN (more of a SQL Server 2005 question)?

 

[Ray McCoppin]

SAN works great for any SQL database. Typically SAN is faster than local
hard drive when attached locally using Fibre Channels.
Make sure that is really SAN (Storage Area Network) and not NAS (Network
Attached Storage) . NAS is slower than local drives and will not work well
as SQL storage. Try to get your storage (LUN’s) spread across at least as
many spindles as you have CPU’s.

Hope this helps

 

[Paul Conroy]

Some would say that Windows 2003 Clusters and earlier are not suitable for
usage with a SAN (I'm not one of them). This derives from the fact the
Server 2003 uses SCSI resets as a final mechanism for identifying whether a
LUN is online. It is possible, that sending a SCSI reset could cause the
cluster to failover. Whilst an extremely rare occurance it remains
technically possible.

This is addressed in Server 2008 where the use of SCSI resets have been
removed from the cluster solution.

As Ray suggests SQL always operates optimally when it dedicated use to
physical spindles.

I'd strongly suggest getting a SAN with as much CACHE as possible and using
SQL x64 which as much RAM as you can reasonably necessary. This will reduce
the load on the disk as data will come from cache and not the SAN disk.

When creating any volume for use by SQL or Exchange, ensure that you align
the disk heads. This can provide a performance enhancement of upto 15%.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa995867.aspx

HTH
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