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Scullpa
Starting Member
3 Posts |
 Posted - 2002-04-08 : 11:43:52
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| My company is considering implementing a NAS environment. I am the DBA at my company and am a bit reluctant given how the LEVEL LOCKING work in a NAS environment. We are currently using Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 on both NT 4 and Windows 2000 workstations. We will most likely be upgrading to Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Windows XP over the next year or so.In my current environment, we have TABLE LEVEL LOCKING that occurs when writing transactions to the database. In the NAS enviroment we have been told, they only allow DATABASE LEVEL LOCKING when writing transactions to the database. To handle the issue, the NAS solution will write the transactions to cache on a fixed drive in the NAS pool and write the transactions to the database when available. The size of the planned cache is 128MB. Obviously, this has me very worried... the thought of losing data or having data corruption automatically jumps to the forefront.In addition, my company is on the smallish side and the price seems pretty high for a company of my size.I was hoping to get some feedback from anyone who may be familiar or use use a NAS solution in their database environment. Thanks!!! |
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MichaelP
Jedi Yak
2489 Posts |
Posted - 2002-04-08 : 11:58:24
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| What is the goal of implimenting NAS for your company? To Centralize data?To use for clustering?Michael |
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Scullpa
Starting Member
3 Posts |
Posted - 2002-04-08 : 11:59:50
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| To centralize data... |
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MichaelP
Jedi Yak
2489 Posts |
Posted - 2002-04-08 : 12:10:06
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| I don't think I'd want to put my SQL data on the same "drive" as everything else, esp. on a possible "dangerous" disk.1. I would think that your I/O speed is not going to be as good as some SCSI disks in some sort of a RAID array (5, 0/1, etc). This is due to other applications and users writing to this same "disk" and the fact that it's a network connection to this "disk".2. I'm not familiar with this particular locking issue, but it sounds bad nad it also sounds like you are not very trusting of it either.3. If you ever lose that NAS device, you lost everything. ALl the eggs are in that one NAS basket.Sounds dangerous to me. The first problem with it, heads would roll methinks. This is just my opinion, so take it for what it's worth.Michael |
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chadmat
The Chadinator
1974 Posts |
Posted - 2002-04-08 : 12:44:29
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| It is not really recommended to use NAS with SQL Server, SAN is a much better solution. There are a whole host of problems that you bring into the equation when using NAS, not the least of which are corruption, and performance hits.Read this article, and use it to persuade the powers that be that this is a bad idea.http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q304261-Chad |
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MichaelP
Jedi Yak
2489 Posts |
Posted - 2002-04-08 : 13:41:06
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| Man, as bad as MS bashed NAS, you'd think they were made by SUN!Anyway, nice link Chad.Michael |
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robvolk
Most Valuable Yak
15732 Posts |
Posted - 2002-04-08 : 14:04:38
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Bashed? They didn't say "NAS is evil, the devil's spawn" or "NAS is a cancer, it also causes cancer" or even "We will murder your children if you use NAS!" THAT would be true Microsoft bashing  |
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MichaelP
Jedi Yak
2489 Posts |
Posted - 2002-04-08 : 14:07:19
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| ....but then Microsoft would buy the company, and all the sudden NAS would be the best thing since the Yak! |
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NAS - Network Attached Storage and SQL