SQLBits Slide Deck

Here is my provisional slide deck for my SQLBits 9 session:
SQL Storage for the Real World:

Any feedback will be appreciated!
I will be presenting in the Aintree room, on Saturday, at 16:00 - hope to see you there!

SQLBits Prep...

An overview of what I’ll be covering in my SQLBits session

I have pretty much finished up my slides for my session at SQLBits, and now I’m going over the content I want to discuss for each slide. To give you some idea of what I’m going to discuss, here is the summary page from the session:

• Requirements
• Storage concepts
• Storage options and priorities
• SAN / DAS
• HA / DR implications
• Decide on a storage strategy
• General guidance

It feels fairly easy to talk about the storage concepts and technologies for ages on end, but the problem is that it can come across as a little dry. I did a quick run through with my team last week and I nearly put some of them to sleep. So this week and next is all about making the content interesting!


I was originally going to avoid using vendor names and naming products, but then the whole discussion becomes very theoretical and difficult to relate to. Therefore I’m going to try to be fair and balanced with everyone I discuss and not mention any products that I really don’t like...


I promise to make the session as informative and interesting as possible!

The reason for my silence is...

My submission for the SQLBits 9 conference (Query across the Mersey) has been accepted!!!
Been spending a lot of time working on my presentation, so hopefully it will go well!

I have never presented at a conference before, so I'm a little anxious but also very excited at the prospect!
My session is the last session on Saturday (community day), so if you can make it I would be most grateful!
It is titled: SQL Storage for the real world.


If it goes well, I will expand it into a series of articles here on my blog.

More info on the conference:
http://sqlbits.com/default.aspx

And this is what I was talking about...

In my previous entry I mentioned that you could build a SAN that performed better and cost less than your commercial SANs out there. Now I'm not going to make light of doing so, but here is an article to validate what I was trying to say:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/20/nexenta_vmworld_2011/

"Cheap and cheerful storage from Nexenta matched EMC and NetApp's multi-million-dollar systems in VMworld 2011's Hands On Lab, and took up some of the slack from its rivals when difficulties arose on the first day. EMC and NetApp have cooly brushed off Nexenta's claims it outperformed them."

Really good to see some competition out there, as well as some proof that there isn't too much magic underneath the SAN covers...

Build Your Own Storage Array?

So for me it's a massive temptation to build my own storage array and pop it into production...
It's significantly cheaper and possibly more perfomant than buying a pre-configured brand name unit, and it would be fun to build. Idea's of slapping multiple PCI SSD's into a supermicro chassis, and then filling the drive cages with big SATA tubs really excites me! You can get the best of both worlds - blazing fast SSD's plus big storage all in one unit. Spec up lots of RAM for a really fat cache and you have the potential to blow away most units on the market.

You get some amazing software to give you as little or as much functionality as you could possibly want - eOpen, SAN Symphony, Starwind etc. all give you amazing features or you could go VSA and try the Lefthand or other virtual SAN solution...

Yes I know these idea's are naive, but it's the basis for a lot of the storage companies out there...
So if the hardware is there, and the software is there, then why not...?

Simple - when this solution has problems, all responsibility will lie with you alone. You can't call in the cavalry when you suddenly find there is a massive compatibility issue with a new software version or firmware edition.
I don't know about you, but I have enough stress in my job already, and don't need to be lying in bed at night wondering if a new firmware version is going to fix a bug or create new ones for me... I would rather leave that to a team of professionals who focus all their time and effort on this exact question.

Is there a time I would do it? Yes, definitely. If cost was the single biggest motivating factor for the company, or if I was unable to attain the performance levels that my system required under a specific budget. Also these kinds of solutions are great for dev and test, as long as downtime is permissible and you don't have a 5 9's SLA. You can build a very big storage solution very cost effectively in this manner and you can also build some very fast systems in this way (Tony Rogerson's blog comes to mind). But they are not enterprise class solutions - and if you consider your SQL installation to be enterprise worthy, then why risk the whole thing for a few pounds?

On Monitoring

Tonight it occurred to me that monitoring is more important than we probably give it credit for.
The way I see it, it should server 3 purposes:

1) Alerting - this is obvious but sometimes ineffective. As an example, that email that comes in at 3am, to tell you that a critical job has failed, is only going to be read when you wake up in the morning. So not only does it have to be accurate and timious, but it also needs to be appropriately delivered.

2) Provide situational information. So you get the dreaded phone call from the night shift that something is broken. You dial in and open your monitoring tools and you should be immediately be greeted with both what went wrong / is going wrong, and what is causing it. I guess this is a little eutopian to believe that both cause and effect would be shown that easily, but the goal is that at least there is enough info to diagnose the problem directly from the metrics the monitoring is displaying to you.

3) Trending. I guess most people would classify this under a different category to monitoring, but I believe that trending and performance prediction is an integral aspect of any monitoring solution. All the data you need for your capacity planning should be captured by your monitoring solution, and is probably already stored in it's database right now - the question is, can you access it easily?

I have a fetish for monitoring, and believe that none of the 3rd party products I have seen adequately  address all facets of SQL monitoring. Most do a reasonable job, and you could get by with almost any of them, but what are you inadvertently missing? To combat this, I prefer to run multiple solutions simultaneously on our high value systems. Yes, this means greater overhead on these servers, but the combination of overlapping redundancy and the different perspectives given buy different monitoring solutions can be extremely enlightening. On course you can be hardcore and roll your own, but I'm too busy doing interesting things to be writing a million scripts that probably only cover 50% of the things that I need to know.