Storage

How much cache to allocate for servers that host 500gb databases?

The short answer is as much as possible. The more exact answer is you typically can’t allocate cache to a specific LUN.  You can usually carve up the total amount of cache into read and write cache.  You want as much write cache as possible so that the database writes directly to the disk as...

What are your opinions on using an iSCSI NAS for SQL Server storage?

You’ve really got two questions here.  The first is if I like iSCSI for SQL, and the second is if I like NAS for SQL.  NAS doesn’t support iSCSI as iSCSI is a SAN technology. iSCSI is just fine for SQL Server as long as the server and the storage are on the same subnet, and the network has...

Ever have this conversation?

Have you ever had this conversation with your storage admin? [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/yZlbLkD46Kc" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] If you have, then do I have a session for you to attend.  On January 14, 2011 in Tampa, FL I'll be presenting...

If you are going to provide SQL Server support, you should probably know what you are doing.

So the other day I got a ticket opened by my companies Managed Service Provider.  There was a backup failure on one of our databases.  The response from the hosting provider was:

This failed due to a "Error: 3041, Severity: 16, State: 1." error. This is because you...
			

We are currently running on an EMC SAN. Did I hear you correctly, we should have databases, backups, temp, and logs on the same LUN? Thanks.

No, you want to put them on different LUNs.  IBM is currently recommending that on the XIV array that everything can be put on a single LUN as the LUN is spread over all the disks in the array.  For an EMC array you’ll want to have separate LUNs for each. Denny

Do you have any affordable recommendations (mid-size company) for DR to a secondary site, about 11 TB of storage?

It depends on how you are going to handle your data replication.  If you are going to use native array based replication then you’ll need to either use array’s data replication options or look at EMC’s recover point. If however you are going to handle the replication outside of the...

Database Restores and Torn Pages

This weekend I was migrating some databases from one server to another.  As these were rather large databases (about 2 TB in size) and I didn't have the clusters setup on a SAN (using DAS instead) I needed to setup log shipping from one cluster to another so that the downtime when moving was kept...