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Questions tagged [storage-area-network]

A SAN is a Storage Area Network, for providing block-level access to storage subsystems across a network.

SANs provide block-level access to servers across a network. Commonly used SAN technologies are iSCSI and Fiber-channel (sometimes spelled Fibre-channel)

A Storage Area Network is distinctly different from Network Attached Storage (NAS). SAN systems don't provide any file-level access, although some combined (hybrid) systems exist which combine the features of a SAN device with those of a NAS.

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What is the difference between SAN, NAS and DAS?

What is the difference between SAN, NAS and DAS?
sevugarajan
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Pay no attention to that SAN behind the curtain

Once upon a time, I built my own SQL servers, and had control over drive configuration, RAID levels, etc. The traditional advice of separation of data, logs, tempdb, backups, (depending on budget!) was always a pretty important part of the SQL…
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What is a Storage Area Network, and which benefits does it have over different storage solutions?

I'm proposing this to be a canonical question about enterprise-level Storage Area Networks. What is a Storage Area Network (SAN), and how does it work? How is it different from a Network Attached Storage (NAS)? What are the use cases compared to…
Massimo
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Tuning iSCSI storage

This is a Canonical Question about iSCSI we can use as a reference. iSCSI is a protocol that puts SCSI commands as payload into TCP network packets. As such, it is subject to a different set of problems than, say, Fibre Channel. For example, if a…
Basil
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Testing whether jumbo frames are actually working

Is there a command to test whether jumbo frames are actually working? i.e. some sort of "ping" that reports whether or not the packet was broken up along the way. I've an ESXi host with an Ubuntu VM which mounts a Dell MD3000i via iSCSI. I suspect…
pufferfish
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What kind of storage do people actually use for VMware ESX servers?

VMware and many network evangelists try to tell you that sophisticated (=expensive) fiber SANs are the "only" storage option for VMware ESX and ESXi servers. Well, yes, of course. Using a SAN is fast, reliable and makes vMotion possible. Great. But:…
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SQL Server disk design on an ISCSI SAN

Its standard practice to separate log and data files to separate disks away from the OS (tempdb, backups and swap file also) Does this logic still make sense when your drives are all SAN based and your LUNS are not carved of specific disk or raid…
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How should I set up my Fibre Channel (FC) network?

How do FC switches work, and how should I configure mine?
Basil
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Cheapest iSCSI SAN for Windows 2008/SQL Server clustering?

Are there any production-quality iSCSI SANs suitable for use with Windows Server 2008/SQL Server for failover clustering? So far, I've only seen Dell's MD3000i, and HP's MSA 2000 (2012i), which both are around $6K with a minimal disk configuration.…
MichaelGG
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Why would a heavily disk intensive application run faster on a SAN than on a Physical Disk?

Why would a heavily disk intensive application run faster on a SAN than on a Physical Disk? I would have expected the Physical disk to be slightly faster but in fact the process ran 100 times faster when it's work drive was set to a partition on the…
Stuart Woodward
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150 TB and growing, but how to grow?

My group currently has two largish storage servers, both NAS running debian linux. The first is an all-in-one 24-disk (SATA) server that is several years old. We have two hardware RAIDS set up on it with LVM over those. The second server is 64…
seandavi
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ZFS and SAN -- best practices?

Most discussions of ZFS suggest that the hardware RAID be turned off and that ZFS should directly talk to the disks and manage the RAID on the host (instead of the RAID controller). This makes sense on a computer with 2-16 or even more local disks,…
chris
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Best practice for assigning private IP ranges?

Is it common practice to use certain private IP address ranges for certain purposes? I'm starting to look into setting up virtualization systems and storage servers. Each system has two NICs, one for public network access, and one for internal…
Tauren
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Best Practices for virtualizing servers onto the SAN?

Alright, so I want to start leveraging my SAN a little more than I have been, and at the same time, take advantage of ESXi. Currently, I've got an array of Dell PowerEdge 1955 blades connected to a single-enclosure EMC AX4-5 FC storage array. I'm…
Matt Simmons
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SQL Server Files Local or NAS or SAN?

I have to install a new Server with SQL Server 2008, What do you recommend, One server with Raid 10 or the Files in a NAS? What about iSCSI should I use it? What about SAN? The server has 4Gb of RAM and that database file is about 2GB. To make my…
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