Linked Questions

110 votes
8 answers
23k views

How can a single disk in a hardware SATA RAID-10 array bring the entire array to a screeching halt?

Prelude: I'm a code-monkey that's increasingly taken on SysAdmin duties for my small company. My code is our product, and increasingly we provide the same app as SaaS. About 18 months ago I moved our ...
Stu Thompson's user avatar
  • 3,379
40 votes
8 answers
3k views

What's the best way to explain storage issues to developers and other users

When server storage gets low developers all start to moan, "I can get a 1 TB drive at Walmart for 100 bucks, what's the problem". How can the complexities of storage be explained to developers so ...
John Dyer's user avatar
  • 735
37 votes
2 answers
8k views

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 ...
Massimo's user avatar
  • 71.3k
30 votes
2 answers
16k views

Why are enterprise SAS disk enclosures seemingly so expensive?

I will begin by stating that I do not believe this is a duplicate of Why is Enterprise Storage so expensive?. My question is specifically about SAS drive enclosures, and justifying their expense. ...
Sam Elstob's user avatar
16 votes
3 answers
77k views

SAS vs Near-line SAS vs SATA

I'm unsure about the differences in these storage interfaces. My Dell servers all have SAS RAID controllers in them and they seem to be cross-compatible to an extent. The Ultra-320 SCSI RAID ...
Dai's user avatar
  • 2,299
6 votes
3 answers
723 views

Shared Disk in modern data center (SAN, virtualization, etc)

I'm a developer...treading here on foreign terrain. Please pardon any naivete. I work on an application that stores data both in a database and the filesystem. Context: Clustering and Network ...
user50460's user avatar
  • 325
2 votes
4 answers
337 views

Why should I choose an Enterprise Storage Vendor?

I have been basically psyched out by some of the sales consultants from enterprise vendors such as EMC and NetApp. We have a new requirement to store around 30 TB of unstructured data, and around 100-...
ramdaz's user avatar
  • 695
2 votes
2 answers
2k views

RAID 0 InnoDB speed - Comparing 8 x 7,200 RPM drives or 4 x 15,000 RPM drives

I am planning to set up a RAID array for scratch space use in a computational server (16 cores, 128 GB RAM). The users will routinely be creating large (500GB) MySQL InnoDB databases and storing these ...
billyshaneguy's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
100 views

Taking pressure off a storage server using a cache server? [closed]

In our small business we process large amounts of print-quality ads, and our graphics departments read/write directly to our storage server (Lenovo px4-300d); but after a series of issues it's coming ...
Kver's user avatar
  • 21
1 vote
4 answers
807 views

SSD as cheap alternative to SAN storage? [closed]

We are a $3B company with a team of 6 infrastructure experts. I am a DBA, not part of infra team. Our setup is all VMware ESX 5.1, EMC SAN for storage and ExaGrid for backups. Prod and non-prod ...
Don's user avatar
  • 21
0 votes
3 answers
2k views

What are the benefits of having local disks on hypervisor nodes running VMs off a SAN?

When an hypervisor like XenServer or vSphere can be run on diskless nodes (eg. by booting from flash cards or from the network) and VM storage is handled via a SAN, is there any good use for local ...
Luke404's user avatar
  • 5,886
0 votes
2 answers
562 views

Seagate Momentus XT for Hyper-V [closed]

Has anyone tried these hybrid drives for virtualization? (More specifically Hyper-v + Raid or JBOD). I'm interested in how it performs as I'm running a few servers at home, and the disk I/O is killing ...
Sleeper Smith's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
192 views

What kind of hardware should I be looking at to scale to ~20k users continually? [closed]

Let's say it's something like Stack Exchange that I'll be running (it isn't, but it's close enough to have similar resource usage), and I'll have approximately 20000 users from August to January (with ...
Ryan Lester's user avatar
-3 votes
1 answer
2k views

What is difference with server harddisk? [closed]

I want to know is there harddisk specially for server? What is the name of it? If I am using home external harddisk to serve files for client, what is the difference with it when using server harddisk?...
John Kenedy's user avatar
-4 votes
1 answer
113 views

How much should it cost to implement shadowing for a Windows Server 2008 environment? [closed]

I should perhaps preface this by saying that I am not a sysadmin but rather a user. The reason I'm asking this question is because I and other users at my company have experienced accidental deletion ...
user132946's user avatar