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Can the SQL server have SAN storage, or do the drives HAVE to be physical?

I am fairly new to Solarwinds and have inherited a system already in place. I noticed our web console was running quite slow and had been told in the past this could be because of issues with the database. I reached out to our database team who said they saw some IO bottleneck for the TempDB and would like to move it to a different drive. Problem is the are no more available slots for harddrives on the server. So the question was raised of if it could be attached to the SAN storage. My predecessor had mentioned that Solarwinds advises against using SAN storage. My question is why? and also if we did, would it void any type of support?

Thank you.

Austin.

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adatole

From my (user, not SolarWinds support) perspective, SAN storage WORKS and can be used, but support will give you flack in certain situations. They are adamant that you should NEVER put it on a RAID 5 SAN, and prefer RAID 10 (I think, but I'd have to check the documentation).

The upshot is that SolarWinds is insanely read-write intensive, and the more spindles you throw at it, the better it does. Anything you do to limit the spindles ore restrict the ability to do thousands of small, fast read-write operations has the potential to hurt you down the road.

jangliss

Do you know where your predecessor may have seen that? I've never seen anything suggest that SAN attached storage be recommended, just RAID (1+0) levels. The only recommendation regarding SQL server that is "against" is having your pollers and SQL box separated by a WAN.

Requirements: Requirements for SolarWinds SAM

I'd find it very odd for them to recommend against using a SAN for storage, especially as the I/O throughput for SANs is usually far better than local disks. Maybe your predecessor misunderstood something?

aLTeReGo

Running the Orion SQL database on a SAN is most certainly supported. However, it is possible that the support engineer may have recommended against running the Orion database on SAN storage for several reasons. Most of this is based on previous customer issues and customer feedback. For example, even in environments that that have a screamingly fast RAID 10 configuration with say 10 spindles might have server other I/O intensive applications running on different servers that share that same RAID group. The storage I/O contention from those other applications that share the same RAID group as the Orion database could negatively impact the performance of Orion. If you've properly accounted for this scenario in your storage environment and other LUNs are not sharing the same RAID group as Orion then you're unlikely to encounter this issue. Another factor related to SAN storage and the Orion database is what occurs when the SAN or Fibre Channel switch dies? If the Orion database resides on SAN storage in this scenario you would not be alerted to the SAN failure or the impact that has on other servers in your environment. While most every SAN array includes multiple levels of redundancy. these factors need to be considered when deciding whether or not to place your Orion database on SAN storage.