Fiber disk VS SAS/SATA

[sjsotelo]

We are looking into buying a san, however we have a budget and we are looking at the EMC cx300 with the fiber drives and 2gig fiber connection to our sql 2000 databases (dell 2950s). However how will the EMC AX4 with a 2gig fiber connection to our databases and SAS/SATA drives compare to those in the CX300?

Will the CX300 have noticeably better performance then the AX4, in terms of I/O and throughput.

Thanks for your help and suggestions!

-Stephen

 

[RMGBELGIUM]

at a disk level,FCAL and SAS are giving you nearly the same speeds,SATA will certainly be slower.But it is the array that is handling the IO, so I do not know if the cx300 and AX4 can be compared to each other (don't really know EMC storage boxes ).But when you are talking about databases, you shouldn't focus that hard on throughput, but more on responsetime.

hope this helps

rgds,

R.

 

[baddos]

Well they are two vastly different arrays. I guess it would depend on how you want to grow your SAN. Do you plan on adding more arrays and hosts, or just running your existing couple of database servers and their databases?

The smaller AX4 is probably fine for you though. Use the SAS drives for your data file groups and SATA for your tranlog.

 

[RMGBELGIUM]

@baddos : I would never put transactionlogs on sata,as these disks are hit hard in a busy DB environment.Everything that is DB, put them on FCAL or SAS.Little accessed or historical data you put on slower disks because there,performance will not really matter.