Re: Anyone using a SAN?

On Feb 13, 2008 12:46 PM, Kenneth Marshall <ktm(at)rice(dot)edu> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 10:56:54AM -0600, Peter Koczan wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > We're considering setting up a SAN where I work. Is there anyone using
> > a SAN, for postgres or other purposes? If so I have a few questions
> > for you.
> >
> > - Are there any vendors to avoid or ones that are particularly good?
> >
> > - What performance or reliability implications exist when using SANs?
> >
> > - Are there any killer features with SANs compared to local storage?
> >
> > Any other comments are certainly welcome.
> >
> > Peter
> >
>
> Peter,
>
> The key is to understand your usage patterns, both I/O and query.
> SANs can be easily bandwidth limited which can tank your database
> performance. There have been several threads in the mailing list
> about performance problems caused by the use of a SAN for storage.

It's critical that you set up the SAN with a database in mind
otherwise the performance will be bad. I tested a DB on a SAN
designed to maximize storage space and performance was terrible. I
never had the time or resources to reconfigure the SAN to test a more
suitable spindle setup since the SAN was in heavy production use for
file archiving.

Alex