Database Reference
In-Depth Information
achievable from your design. Benchmarking and baselining performance are critical to
your success, so we've dedicated an entire chapter (
Chapter 10
, “
How to Baseline
the important storage system component performance aspects that will feed into your
benchmarking and baselining activities.
The Five Key Principles of Database Storage Design
When architecting storage for SQL Server, it's important to understand a few important
principles. These will help guide your design decisions and help you achieve
acceptable performance both now and in the future. These principles are important
because over the past decade, CPU performance has increased at a much faster pace
than storage performance, even while capacity has exploded.
Principle 1: Your database is just an extension of your storage
The first principle is highlighted in
Figure 6.1
:
that your database is just an extension of
your storage. A database is designed to efficiently and quickly organize, retrieve, and
process large quantities of data to and from storage. So increasing the parallelism of
access to storage resources at low latency will be an important goal. Later in this
chapter, we cover how to optimize the architecture of your database to maximize its
storage performance and parallelism. When you understand this principle, it's easy to
understand why getting your storage design and performance is so critical to the success
of your SQL Server Database virtualization project.
Figure 6.1
Quote from Michael Webster, VMworld 2012
Principle 2: Performance is more than underlying storage devices
The next key principle is that storage performance is more than just about underlying
storage devices and spindles, although they are very important too. SQL Server storage
performance is multidimensional and is tightly coupled with a number of different
system components, such as the number of data files allocated to the database, the
number of allocated vCPUs, and the amount of memory allocated to the database. This
is why we like to use the term “IT Food Groups,” because it is so important to feed your
database the right balance of these critical resources. This interplay between resources
such as CPU, Memory, and Network and their impact on storage architecture and
performance will be covered in subsequent sections of this chapter.
Principle 3: Size for performance before capacity
