Below are answers to questions asked during the recent webinar. If you have additional questions, please contact George Crump at gcrump@storage-switzerland.com or Thomas LaRock at thomas.larock@solarwinds.com
Q: What are the main steps for capacity planning?
A: The first step is to start recording some data for whatever it is you want to plan for. An example is disk storage. If you don't know how much data you had a year ago, how can you accurately predict where you might be in 3, 6, 9, or 12 months in the future?
Q: What do you suggest fora database monitoring tool?
A: Database Performance Analyzer. You don't need anything else.
Q: What issues do you see as the biggest points of conflicts between storage admins and DBAs?
A: One of the biggest issues I see is the discussion of RAID levels. I know many shops like to build out SANs with all RAID5 in order to reduce their risk. But for some database workloads you need different RAID levels.
Q: Would it make sense to do a hybrid where the tempdb was on flash and the user dbs are on disk?
A: Yes, absolutely. In fact, that was one of the very first use cases for SSDs that I can recall.
Q: Does DPA monitor storage usage and can you have alerts set up around it?
A: Yes to both questions!
Q: Is there any integration between SolarWinds Orion and Database Performance Analyzer for monitoring/alerting?
A: Not at the moment, no. I do believe it is on our roadmap.
Q: How can DPA get correct information from the storage and all the parts inbetween? Does it connect to all the systems (SAN, SAN-switches, network switches etc.)?
A: DPA does not collect those details, sorry.