Setting up a raid for SQL Server

G

Gagnon

Weaksauce
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Oct 28, 2009
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I'm interested in doing some research on setting up a raid, 3 to be precise for SQL Server. Thoughts on a config like this:

1 filegroup will be made up of a RAID10 array for Data
1 filegroup will be made up of a RAID10 array for Indexes
1 filegroup will be made up of a RAID10 array for Log

I am pretty green when it comes to hardware, would I need 3 separate Raid conrollers? Would I need a special mobo to handle 3 Raid controllers? Advice on mobo or controllers? Maybe a cadillac version and a hyundai version (work vs. home)?
 
A single raid controller can handle this. I am not sure what fakeraids do that however. You may want to use an ssd for the indexes and log however. No need for a large raid array to store a few GB. Also an SSD would have > 10 times the random read / write performance of a raid array.
 
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an example of 1 of our tables:

# Records: 1,012,514,673
Reserved (KB): 347,030,384
Data (KB): 270,485,768
Indexes (KB): 76,497,384

now keep in mind we have over 2 thousand of these tables (albeit not this large)

current size DB: 2,508,436 MB
 
I would get a hardware raid controller and 15K SAS drives for that. Perhaps one with a large battery backed cache or the one product that has a SSD cache.
 
thanks!

for our existing raid controller are you guys saying we shouldn't have any problem setting up 3 distinct raid volumes?

I just rdp'd into the box, looks like we are using the following storage controllers:

DELL PERC 6/i Integrated RAID Controller
Microsoft iSCSI Initiator
Microsoft Multi-Path Bus Driver

(assuming you only care about the 1st one listed)
 
I do not believe a true hardware controller will have problems with 3 arrays provided you have enough ports. I mean 3 independent raid 10 arrays requires 12 hard drives minimum.


I do not have a perc 6/i so I can't say for sure. It does have only 8 ports though so to use that you need a SAS/ SATA port multiplier to have it support 12 hard drives.
 
drescherjm said:
A single raid controller can handle this. I am not sure what fakeraids do that however. You may want to use an ssd for the indexes and log however. No need for a large raid array to store a few GB. Also an SSD would have > 10 times the random read / write performance of a raid array.
Click to expand...

Would an SSD(technically RAID 1 for redundancy) be faster than a RAID 10 of SAS 10k drives? All one would need is an SSD for indexes and another for logs for a SQL Server?
 
Would an SSD(technically RAID 1 for redundancy) be faster than a RAID 10 of SAS 10k drives?
Click to expand...

Yes. A single SSD would be faster than Raid 10 of 10K SAS drives. Although this application you probably want enterprise drives with higher write endurance. Usually that will mean SLC however Intel will be releasing MLC enterprise drives in a couple of months when they release their G3 SSDs.
 
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