Recently I built a new server to run our beloved SQL Server 2005. The design idea came from Dr. Jim Gray's server brick and SQL Server Magazine March 2006 article "Pare Down and Power Up". Major difference with them are: I choose to use SAS JBOD and SAS RAID controller, and SAS drive. So that the RAID-1, RAID-0, RAID-10 jobs are offloaded from server CPU.
Here comes the proof screenshot during my configuration testing with IO Meter:
Figure 1, IO Meter screenshot, 2.37GB/s Reading speed, at a CPU load 4.75%
This is by far the maximum sustainable number I can achieve, although I believe the system could do better, at least in theory. You may argue that I won't get this fast in production, and yes, I agree, only half the spindle will goes for a Very Large Table File Group, others goes for LOG, TempDB, etc. But still, doing a table scan at 1GB/s for a 1TB sized table only need 15 mins.
Here is the challenge for the lucky SAN owners: please use the comment area to show people that your expensive SAN can do better than this. Information needed:
- Your SAN vendor,
- Model,
- Peak speed,
- Price tag
If anyone can kindly offer some prize, then we can run this as a competition! (Note: I hope Santa is browsing our Blog.)