Why is SSIS reading so much data from my hard drive?

Question

We're running SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server 2008 R2 for a our CRM and ERP services.

Unfortunately, the majority of the setup was outsourced to an "expert" company who neglected to provide any documentation. For this and various other reasons, this company was dropped and replaced. Bridges were burnt, so there's no real chance of getting any more information from them.

We're experiencing some quite laggy behaviour with the server. It isn't heavily loaded in terms of CPU and memory, and only deals with the odd request from the CRM and ERP clients.

The laggy behaviour seems to stem from the fact that SSIS is reading megabytes of data each second from the hard drive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Server_Integration_Services

http://www.ssistalk.com/2009/11/04/ssis-what-does-the-ssis-service-actually-do-anyway/

From what I can find - SSIS is there to help import packages that were developed to run in the SQL Server. I've found a few articles about excessive write operations due to SSIS, but nothing about excessive reads.

I'm also trying to figure out if it is safe to remove SSIS.

Answer 1

CRM is probably integrating your SSIS for an ETL job.
Possibly this is done through either Scribe, as most CRM environments I've come across are, or directly through SSIS, as SSIS has become more robust in the last few years when it comes to handling CRM.

Without knowing exactly what you are looking at in terms of SSIS packages, it is impossible to give you a clear answer as to what is going on.

However I can pretty safely say that removing your SSIS instance from the equation without knowing how the CRM uses it, might cause a lot of trouble.
The most likely of which is that your CRM will performance will take a nose-dive right after you remove SSIS.
Or some business process might stop functioning.

Get outside help for this, look for a consultant / firm that knows CRM and SSIS.
The way CRM solutions work, and the way SSIS works is quite transparent, with the correct access the consultant should be able to unravel most of it for you.