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Copyright © 2015 Kendal Van Dyke. All rights reserved.
Kendal is a database strategist, community advocate, public speaker, and blogger. A practiced IT professional with over 15 years of SQL Server experience, Kendal excels at disaster recovery, high availability planning/implementation, & debugging/troubleshooting mission critical SQL Server environments. Kendal is a Senior Consultant on the Microsoft Premier Developer Support team and President of MagicPASS, the Orlando, FL based chapter of PASS. Before joining Microsoft, Kendal was a SQL Server/Data Platform MVP from 2011-2016.
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7 comments
This is a great series! As an enterprise storage professional, it's nice to see folks in other areas looking this deep into storage questions.
One thing I want to point out, though, is that intelligent caching disk arrays found in many larger data centers (think EMC, IBM, HDS, HP, NetApp, etc) throw these results in the trash however. Each has its own idiosyncrasies, to be sure, but none is as clear-cut as the basic RAID you're experimenting with.
I've had many a SQL DBA argue that he couldn't run on RAID-5 because of his experiences with low-end RAID systems. But after demonstrating the performance of an enterprise array he definitely changed his tune! I'm no cheerleader, just a realist!
Thanks again for your work and posts!
It seems part 2 only loads a blank page :(
Stephen, thanks for your positive comments. You are correct, these tests were performed against local storage and DASD. SANs are a different beast, though from what I understand partition offset still needs to be taken into consideration to achieve optimal performance.
Oh, yeah, block alignment is definitely important in a caching SAN environment. And RAID levels can still have some effect as well, but not anywhere near as much as other factors.
Great piece Kendal. I can see many hours went into it. I was just wondering if you ever got round to testing a configuration with a 128KB stripe size and 128KB partition offset? Given the geometry of partition alignment I would be curious to see the results. Thanks again.
Here's an addition regarding Solid state drives (SSD)
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/joe_chang/archive/2009/07/01/why-have-we-not-seen-tpc-c-and-tpc-e-benchmarks-using-ssd-storage.aspx
Kendal,
Thanks for sharing your methodology and results. Shows the importance of actually benchmarking and comparing possible configurations before you decide what route to take.
Thanks,
Matt
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