On October 12th 2012 I’ll be presenting an all day session titled “Storage and Virtualization for the DBA” as a pre-con session for SQL Saturday 145 in Nashville, TN (links to all four pre-cons can be found on the SQL Saturday 145 page). This popular pre-con session has been presented in locations like the SQL PASS Summit, SQL Day 2012 in Poland, SQL Bits X in London, SQL Saturdays in Florida and California and now the session is coming to Nashville, TN.
This session will be a two part session in which we will be focusing on two of the biggest topics in the DBA field. How to properly design your SAN storage solution and how to properly design your virtualization solution.
The storage portion of this session will focus on SAN storage, but most of the material will apply to direct attached storage as well.
In the first half of the session we’ll be focusing on the storage array. Storage can be one of the biggest bottlenecks when it comes to database performance. It’s also one of the hardest places to troubleshoot performance issues because storage engineers and database administrators often do not speak the same language. In this session, we’ll be looking at storage from both the database and storage perspectives. We’ll be digging into LUNs, HBAs, the fabric, as well as the storage configuration.
After going over the components we’ll dig into some advanced storage configurations. This includes RAID groups, multi-pathing software, and proper redundant storage network design. We will also be digging into some advanced storage array backup techniques including taking storage level clones and snapshots. After going over these advanced techniques we will dig into how these can best be used to backup the SQL Server environment to provide maximum redundancy with no recurring tape costs.
In the second half of the day we’ll be looking into the pros and cons of moving SQL Servers into a virtual server environment. Specifically we’ll be looking into when it’s a good idea and when it’s probably not a good idea. Like everything in the database world there are no hard set answers as to if virtualization is a good idea or not, but there are some times when virtualizing a SQL Server is a good idea, and can save you some money. There are some other times when you will be shooting yourself in the foot and virtualization isn’t a good idea. We’ll be focusing on when how to make this decision, and how to gather the metrics that you need in order to come to this decision.
We’ll look into how tie the virtual platforms to the storage array so that you can maximize the storage performance for your SQL Servers and the virtual environment.
The session is priced at $129.95, but through the end of August you can sign up for just $99.95.
I hope to see you there,
Denny