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· This is a highly simplified drawing illustrating the principles of a core edge network. There are 10 servers each with let us say 2 x 4GB HBAs. Network speeds always take the lowest common denominator so the two connections into the storage will also be at 4GB. ( This is an over simplification ) · Essentially there’s more potential bandwidth than supported by the storage; best example I can think of might be the security scans at an airport, 20 check in desks but only 2 body scanners. · An area of contention can be the actual disks or luns, there are different ways of configuring SAN storage, luns may be mapped to physical sets of disks or mapped virtually to an unspecified number of spindles. ( We won’t go into this here ). If you share disks/luns there is always the possibility of contention. You can try this at home if you’ve created more than one partition on your laptop or PC harddrive. Just run a job or task, then run repeat but whilst copying a large file(s) to the other partition. · It is possible that the backplane bandwidth may not be sufficient, most storage has a number of ports, these might be allocated as 8GB, 4GB and 1GB and may relates to types of disks or certain trays, 8 x 8GB ports suggests 64GB bandwidth, however this may not be the case – check with your friendly vendor. · Finally the HBAs and switches may suffer due to buffering, SQL Server tends to push out lots of small io, this is different from a fileserver and there may be latency within the HBA and/or switches. · So how can you tell? Well I’ve been testing by running a job at regular intervals, it’s up to you what you choose but ideally it should be able to provide consistent run times and results, should be repeatable and ideally portable. It should, in my view, be a sql server test using sql code. · Here’s what you might see as results from an hourly test, Red designates failure due to an overrun of time.· The results are hypothetical, but one might deduce that 18:00 shows users going home, the red areas may indicate this when backups occur, the 13:00 run is better, lunchtime maybe?· If your application is 7 x 24 then this type of result is bad news. · Bear in mind this is from a test so the results are not affected by lunch breaks or going home, but most likely the SAN is.· Some typical contention I have encountered over the years has come from Exchange, this manifested as increased io latency with no change in application load, yet another subject area! |