Choosing a storage system for MS SQL

Question

Iron

There was a need to create a failover MS SQL cluster, and at the same time increase the performance of the database by increasing the speed of the disk system (bottleneck). Now I'm looking at an inexpensive Supermicro solution www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R-E1R36N.cfm . Tell me, is it worth looking towards Supermicro, or considering similar solutions from IBM, EMC, HP, etc.? What is the real difference? The budget for storage is up to $ 20,000. At the moment, the base is running on HP DL380p8gen, on 8 SAS drives 15k in RAID 50. Supermicro's planned configuration is 28 SAS 15K at 300Gb, and 8x100Gb SSD cache. It is also planned to use this storage for storing VMware VMs, in case the load is low. MS SQL DB size 200Gb.

Answer 1

Service difference. It is for the service that you pay the difference (pun intended) in the price. If your base and its availability is not critical for business, then you can afford anything, up to self-collection. If the availability of data is critical, then I would not neglect a good service if I were you, so as not to be “the disk has crashed, but we cannot change it for you, because first we will send it for examination, then we will wait for the delivery of the container with disks, which unsuccessfully stuck at customs, and then you will already get your disk to replace the dead one ”
I would add NetApp to the three listed above. For MS SQL, he has a killer offer with saving and restoring the database in seconds into snapshots that do not slow down the system. It looks something like this:
communities.netapp.com/videos/2391
20 thousand is quite enough not to fool around with a self saw, but to buy a brand with the appropriate attitude and service.

Answer 2

In general, we didn’t have anything in the Supermicro comparison test, but I’ve already seen enough of it. IMHO even self-assembly will look more interesting. And if we talk about brands, I would look at Dell, we really liked it after a detailed examination. I think you need something like Dell PowerVault MD3200 , if anything - contact me, I'll help you with the purchase :) Don't take it for advertising :)

Answer 3

You pay for convenience. If something happens to you with HP, a person comes to you and sorts it out. Up to the replacement of iron starting with the motherboard. In the case of Supermicro, you are indulging yourself.
To understand how much it is needed, imagine the situation that you have a part of the service or the entire service associated with this DBMS. How much will the company lose during 1 day of downtime at best, and who will be to blame and compensate for the losses?
Now about the cluster as a whole and virtual machines. MS has its own clustered file system, which works quite well. just used for MSSQL and Hyper-V machines.
Therefore I strongly would think , how vmvare rested against your side ?
As a result, I see your situation something like this. Build storage systems based on Supermicro using MS storage Space technology. As I said in other answers here, this is a server + Jbod cart or just a server, all in one. Give everything over 10gb ethernet or infinity band. FaberChanell is slowly but surely losing ground. For this basket, I would think of a hot swap, where when one exits, the other will enter the course. For machines, create MS ClusterFileSystem and give it to MSSQL and Hyper-v databases, which will be the same in a cluster of 3 machines! To all this, you can create continuous replication of these virtual machines (although one more server is required).
It is possible to lift and iscsi.
Well, the bottleneck here will be only switch. To avoid a bottleneck, you will need a stackable switch, bonding eterhnet to different switch ports. But this is right as it should be, whether the budget will allow this to be done is another question.