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As a DBA, one of your many tasks is to manage your SQL Server databases’ ever-expanding storage requirements. How often do you find yourself adding more disk, trying to accurately size a database, or wishing you could more efficiently use your existing disk capacity?
In this book, we’ve pulled together four articles from SQL Server Magazine to give you an overview of SQL Server storage options. In Chapter 1, you’ll learn how housing databases on a SAN can benefit DBAs in various ways. SANs can reduce the pain of sizing storage requirements for databases, enhance overall storage throughput, simplify storage performance tuning, and improve availability. Using a SAN can also decrease backup and restore windows and enables quicker and easier testing cycles and reduced overhead in test storage. The availability of iSCSI removes the cost barriers that have until now inhibited some users from investigating SANs.
In Chapter 2, we’ll look at the emerging solid state disk (SSD). Historically, the most widely used types of storage have been DAS, NAS, SANs, and—more recently—iSCSI SANs. Each type has its niche, including associated advantages and disadvantages. But a new trend in the storage market threatens to blow them all out of the water: solid state disk (SSD). SSDs are no longer limited to government or niche markets. They’re widely available from several vendors for use in enterprise applications. SQL Server environments can especially benefit from SSDs, because SQL Server is such an I/O-intensive application. As the price of these devices continues to drop, and their storage capacity continues to increase, they present an affordable, high-performance alternative to traditional storage options.
Chapter 3 provides an overview of the different storage types. People often wonder about server storage options. What are the differences between different storage types? What solution is best for a particular situation? You have to sort through a lot of acronyms with server storage: U320 SCSI, SATA, SAS, NAS, iSCSI, SAN . . . the list goes on and on. In this chapter, we'll demystify server storage options and help you determine which solution is best for different situations.
Chapter 4 presents a two-step process for tracking disk usage. Have your customers or managers ever asked you how much their databases grew during the past year? Have you needed to plan how much disk capacity you'll need for the next year based on your database's average growth rate during the past 12 months? How long will your existing unallocated disk space last based on your current growth rate? To answer these kinds of database-growth questions or similar disk-space questions, you need some historical space-usage information about your databases. The author has developed a process that you can use to automatically collect space-usage statistics for each of your databases. You can then use the collected space information to perform a simple growth-rate calculation.