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Increasing Database Speed with Solid State Drives (SSD)

emulsifiedemulsified Member Posts: 139
edited 2014-03-26 in NAV/Navision Classic Client
It's time for me to build a new production server and migrate Navision 4.0 SP3 native database to it.

Since I'm building a monster from scratch I was wondering if I should get some Solid State Drives just for the Navision database to reside on. The IOPS rate is much higher than a magnetic hard drive with moving parts and has more than 2x the MTBF rate.

Should I do a mirror configuration or a RAID stripe configuration. It has always been in my mind that a RAID configuration for a Navision database is bad and that a MIRROR is the best way to go because READ rate on a mirror was much higher and the faster way to go.

My configuration is as follows:

Navision 4.0 SP3
15 Clients
Full 1Gbps copper network (cisco gigabit copper switch)
All clients Intel Desktop 1000Mbps adapters
Server: TCP
Database Used: 7496360 (52%)
Database Size: 14400000 (22%)
Licensed Size: 65536000
DBMS Cache: 200000
Commit Cache: Yes
Object Cache: 64000


Everyone's thoughts and experiences are very much welcomed.

Thank you.
Half-empy or half-full how do you view your database?

Thanks.

Comments

  • krikikriki Member, Moderator Posts: 9,112
    I think you are mixing mirror and RAID.
    Mirroring is more for SQL in case you have 2 different servers and 2 SQL servers and you 'mirror' the data from 1 sql server to another.

    RAID is for disks. And mirroring in this case means means mirroring/striping the disk.

    Native is best used with RAID1 pairs and not RAID10 (Native server has its own 'striping' system) and even less RAID5 (VERY bad for writing).
    Best is to create multiple datafiles (up to 16) and put 1 file on each RAID1 pair and try to limit them to a size of 4GB for maximized performance.


    For your configuration, I think that SSD is overkill. You could gain a lot more by maximizing DB-cache (max is 1GB for native), but generally it is around 850MB and having multiple (small) drives. So having 5 RAID1 pairs of normal SAS 15000RPM drives will give a a lot of performance, costing you less then the SSD drives.
    Regards,Alain Krikilion
    No PM,please use the forum. || May the <SOLVED>-attribute be in your title!

  • KYDutchieKYDutchie Member Posts: 345
    Hi,

    there are some good blog posts about the performance of SSD
    Here is the link: http://blogs.msdn.com/freddyk/archive/tags/SSD/default.aspx

    Hope this helps,

    Regards,

    Willy
    Fostering a homeless, abused child is the hardest yet most rewarding thing I have ever done.
  • David_SingletonDavid_Singleton Member Posts: 5,479
    emulsified wrote:
    ...
    15 Clients
    ...
    Database Used: 7496360 (52%)
    ...

    15 users 7gig DB?

    For that size you don't need a very powerful machine.

    I would just build a good reliable machine with 3 x RAID1s 1 for OS 2 for the DB, maybe 4 for the DB if you want more speed.
    David Singleton
  • xteknikxteknik Member Posts: 7
    I know this is an older post, and I wonder what the author did to move forward.

    For anyone else perusing 'native' and SSD' that comes across this thread..

    I have been running my 8 gig, native, TEST/ Dev. environment on a small box with a single SSD.
    Is it fast?
    Yes!
    When performing a Database - Test - Normal on this machine, the operation takes 30-40 seconds.
    The inherent weakness of this is that it's a single SSD, rather than a RAID1 setup.

    If one isn't careful a lot of work can be lost if your DB or disk or controller takes a dump at tthe end of the day, a long way away from a Hotcopy backup the night before.

    One of my biggest fears is that a failure occurs, requiring all of the work performed by all staff that day to be-done. A SQL setup would be much safer I'm told.

    Now that Intel, business class SSD's are inexpensively available, I am considering moving my Nav server into a VM / SSD setup.
    My aforementioned test box is a VM and has been up and running for a year, and I'm always delighted at how fast it is when we're moving data around or test-running large JetReports..

    I'm resistant to moving to SQL because of licensing costs, at least until the fiscal new year (6 months away)

    Anyone care to detail SQL licensing?
    The benefits I'm looking for are data backup and recovery sided, rather than performance.
    The road to success is always under construction.
  • bbrownbbrown Member Posts: 3,268
    xteknik wrote:
    ... Anyone care to detail SQL licensing?
    The benefits I'm looking for are data backup and recovery sided, rather than performance.


    http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserve ... o-buy.aspx
    There are no bugs - only undocumented features.
  • JFGcanesJFGcanes Member Posts: 11
    David Singleton wrote:
    emulsified wrote:
    ...
    15 Clients
    ...
    Database Used: 7496360 (52%)
    ...

    15 users 7gig DB?

    For that size you don't need a very powerful machine.

    I would just build a good reliable machine with 3 x RAID1s 1 for OS 2 for the DB, maybe 4 for the DB if you want more speed.

    In 2014, with the new Seagate Savvio 15.3K 6Gb/s SAS drives with 64MB of Cache, is the recommendation for a Native DB still that two RAID 1 Arrays (DB in two files) outperform a single RAID 10 array with 4 disks (DB in one file)? My DB (NAV 5 Executables & 40 Users) is currently 26 GB and were are licensed up to 65 GB so our size will definitely increased in the next several years. Since the smallest drive in this series is 146 GB it seems to be overkill to have more than 4 drives on our server. Which way would perform best? Or with the new drives/array controllers is it a wash?

    Thanks,
    John Graney
    Oxford, NC, USA
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