Sunday 20 November 2011


Direct Attached Storage

DAS is the de facto standard against which all other storage is compared. Most servers have built in storage and every server admin is comfortable using it. It is easy to implement with SQL and it is a known quantity in terms of support, configuration and performance. It can potentially be the cheapest option for your server and can have a relatively small footprint in terms of rack space. Until recently, DAS was slightly more limited in terms of maximum capacity and maximum IO performance, but this has been drastically changed in recent years by virtue of large capacity near-line SAS drives and PCIe SSD’s. Most SMB workloads can be configured in one way or another to fit on DAS and generally means that a SAN is only required when shared storage is desirable.

The biggest downsides to DAS are that in general it is considered to be dumb storage and it is less flexible than a SAN. There is no fancy functionality such as snapshotting, replication or thin provisioning. Online volume expansion is not really possible if there is no existing spare capacity available and clustering (shared disks) is not an option. Moving volumes is not trivial and unused capacity is stranded on islands scattered among the individual servers.
Of late the functionality gap has started to be filled by software solutions. Some vendors are offering solutions that provide drive replication, snapshotting etc. which allow DAS to fulfil more of the roles that SAN used to dominate. Examples of these are Steeleye Datakeeper from SIOS and DoubleTake from Vision Solutions. Some of these packages will go as far is integrating with MSCS and allow for clustering with DAS, but I have never personally tried to use it.

PCIe SSD

PCIe SSD’s are a disruptive technology which causes us to re-think our standards. It is now possible to get high end SAN performance or better, in a single, half-height card that can slot into any modern server. It integrates its own form of chip level redundancy on the card to handle individual chip failures, and is directly connected to the PCIe bus resulting in the lowest latency possible. Over and above this, bandwidth and capacity can be scaled by striping data over multiple cards and card redundancy can be achieved by mirroring cards. In addition capacities of over a terabyte can be handled by a single card, which means that almost any workload can be run on a standard 2U or 4U server. There are multiple vendors with products like this, the best know being FusionIO (Who also happen to give a lot back to the SQL community in the UK). At present, no SAN can compete with PCIe SSD’s in terms of latency, and few can compete in terms of price/performance. The biggest downside in my opinion is that you cannot use them for clustering, but this has forced me to re-evaluate the use of mirroring in our environment. Cost per TB can also climb quickly when adding redundancy.
At present I see 2 very interesting use cases for PCIe SSD’s in conjunction with SAN’s in the near future. Say you presently have one or 2 mission critical DB’s which also have high IO requirements, but you can’t afford a second SAN for redundancy. Using the PCIe SSD on a mirrored copy will give you complete storage independence on a second copy, give you the IO performance you need at a significantly lower cost and use hardly any rack space. The second use case is for the TempDB when SQL Server 2012 (Denali) comes out. Not only do you get the benefit of lower latency for the TempDB, but you also reduce the load on the SAN and your HBA’s, thereby making your entire storage subsystem more efficient.

There is also the PCIe SSD SAN acceleration option which I will discuss later.


Storage Area Networks

SAN’s have now become common place in all but the smallest businesses. While they used to be the purview of the large corporations, SAN functionality has filtered down in terms of cost and footprint to the point where you can download a trial version and run it as an application on a server. There is a distinction between SAN software and physical SAN infrastructure, but the majority of benefits are present in both.

The fundamental use of a SAN is to share storage between multiple servers. Storage is consolidated into a smaller number of large pools which can be accessed by several servers simultaneously. Generally an individual SAN consists of a pair of servers acting as head units with a large number of storage interconnects and a large number of communications ports. This allows these head units to connect to very large volumes of storage and to share it out over a variety of connection methods to a large number of application servers. By virtue of the large volume of storage that could be connected, SANs were able to deliver both large capacity and potentially higher performance than was possible through DAS. Over time this has been mitigated, but for very large volumes of data, some kind of pooled storage is going to be desirable.

Along with capacity and performance, SAN vendors also started to introduce functionality that could be used to justify the additional cost of the commodity hardware they were packaging. This is where the value add of SAN’s comes in: online capacity expansion, snapshots, thin provisioning, LUN cloning, SAN replication, boot from SAN, storage tiering and increased availability are all possible benefits, depending on the vendor.

The main downsides to SAN solutions are their cost, complexity and of late, latency at the high end.
Some SAN vendors charge a ridiculous premium that is not justified in terms of the value it brings to the business. If you are not going to be using clustering and the value-add features that a SAN can bring, there is no reason to invest in the technology. A SAN does add complexity and usually adds an additional layer of abstraction that can make troubleshooting more difficult. At the very high end, SAN’s will battle to beat out PCIe SSD’s in terms of latency.

Next up - framed vs frameless SAN...

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