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44 BP1062 | Best Practices for Decision Support Systems with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 using Dell EqualLogic PS Series
Storage Arrays
7 Best practices recommendations
This section summarizes the Dell best practices used in the test setup and also the best practices derived
by running the tests results presented sections 5-6.
7.1 Storage
Use the following best practices when configuring Dell EqualLogic storage arrays for a data warehouse
solution.
• It is an important to physically separate data warehouse workloads on a separate storage system
that is optimized for data warehouse query I/O activity. This will prevent DSS workloads from
interfering with the operation of other workloads.
• Because DW applications are typically bandwidth intensive, 10 GbE iSCSI is recommended.
• The storage arrays must be configured to support capacity and performance requirements by
considering the hard drive types, RAID policy and array controller capabilities.
• For this testing PS6110X with SAS 10K drives were chosen because they offer a good balance for
capacity and throughput needs.
• For data warehouse workloads, RAID 50 is recommended because it offers a good balance
between capacity and performance.
7.2 Network Infrastructure
The following list provides network infrastructure design best practices.
• Since data warehouse workloads tend to be sequential in nature and have larger block sizes, the
key metric in measuring performance would be throughput. Using 10GbE connectivity between
the server and storage would yield a higher throughput performance.
• Design separate network infrastructures to isolate the LAN traffic from the SAN traffic (iSCSI).
• Design redundant SAN component architectures. This includes the NICs on the servers and
switches for the storage network (including server blade chassis switches and external switches).
• Make sure that the server NIC ports and storage array NIC ports are connected so that any single
component failure in the SAN will not disable access to the storage array volumes.
• Enable flow control on both the server NICs and switch ports connected to the server and
storage ports.
• Enable jumbo frames on the server SAN ports and switch ports.
• On iSCSI SAN switches, spanning tree should be disabled on switch ports connecting to end
devices like server and storage ports. The Portfast setting should be enabled in the switch
configuration for these ports.