SAN and disk virtualization - does it really work ?

Hi All,

I've got recently quite nice SAN in my hand and tried to configure it for SQL. The SAN is equipped with 24xSATA 500 GB disk. I had many chats with vendor's technical support guys. They always tried to convince me - create just one big array across all 24 disks, and then create two separate volumes as this allows SAN to perform at full speed and this is the fastest config, because every LUNs will use all of 24 disks so the performance will be the best.

The above technique is called 'disk virtualization'. Does it work in SQL environment as vendor claims ? Is this really the best config for SQL ?

I've run many different tests in many different configurations. The purpose was to check how the SAN performs under different RAID configurations and how the workload resembling SQL server disk activities influences overall SAN performance. There you have some of the results:

config A: (DATA and LOG LUNs are on the same disk array)
DATA : RAID r10, 8x500GB, 64kB stripe
LOG: RAID r10, 8x500GB, 64kB stripe

DATA LUN performance under no load:

ACCESS type               sequential        random 
                        IOPS     MBPS     IOPS    MBPS 
  8 kb block  read   16667,84  130,21    108,4    0,84 
 16 kb block  read   14194,48  221,78    136,88   2,13
 64 kb block  read   6084,78   380,29    126,21   7,88
128 kb block  read   3462,26   432,78    106,25  13,28
256 kb block  read   1990,75   497,68     93,50  23,37
512 kb block  read   1046,59   523,29     82,28  41,14

DATA LUN Performance under load: (the load is 8 kb block sequential write to LOG LUN)

ACCESS type               sequential        random 
                        IOPS     MBPS     IOPS    MBPS 
 8 kb block  read    11518,00   89,98    53,01    0,41
 16 kb block  read   11039,70  172,49    52,04    0,81
 64 kb block  read    4155,71  259,73    43,22    2,70
 128 kb block  read   2123,13  265,39    39,90    4,98
 256 kb block  read    889,84  222,46    28,04    7,01
 512 kb block  read    484,79  242,39    31,77   15,88

Now results when DATA and LOG are on separate disk arrays:

config B: (DATA and LOG are each on own separate disk array)
DATA: RAID r10, 16x500GB, 64kB stripe
LOG: RAID r10, 8x500GB, 64kB stripe

DATA LUN Performance under no load:

ACCESS type               sequential        random 
                        IOPS     MBPS     IOPS    MBPS 
 8 kb block  read    17003,20  132,83   145,51    1,13
 16 kb block  read   13150,31  205,47   142,36    2,22
 64 kb block  read    6367,48  397,96   131,03    8,18
 128 kb block  read   3250,58  406,32   110,4    13,80
 256 kb block  read   2063,60  515,90   96,63    24,15
 512 kb block  read   1205,55  602,77   88,45    44,22

DATA LUN Performance under load: (the load is 8 kb block sequential write to LOG LUN)

ACCESS type               sequential        random 
                        IOPS     MBPS     IOPS     MBPS 
 8 kb block  read   17280,98   135,00    144,11   1,12
 16 kb block  read  14502,53   226,60    141,00   2,20
 64 kb block  read   6922,3    432,64    130,90   8,18
 128 kb block  read  3309,61   413,70    108,53  13,56
 256 kb block  read  2344,68   586,17     95,68  23,92
 512 kb block  read  1205,9    602,95     87,55  43,77

Now draw the conclusions on you own

Regards,
Slawek