When installing your SQL Server, 2000 or 2005, do never forget to check the recommended configuration of your storage space.

I’ve collected over time a series of useful information regarding SQL Server Storage Best Practices, which are as follows:

·         Isolate log from data at the physical disk level (different physical disks)

·         Tempdb on a different drive in respect to other databases (different physical disks)

·         No other Luns on the array on the same disk, when it happens that those Luns are heavy used by other application, then performance might be worse on all Luns

·         Always place log files on RAID 1+0 (The amount of performance gained will vary based on the HW vendor’s RAID implementations.)

·         Performance may benefit if TEMPDB is placed on RAID 1+0

·         Increase the number of tempdb datafiles as described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328551/en-us

·         Having the different tempdb data files on separate disks would be good.

·         Ensure that you have an adequate number of spindles to support your IO requirements with an acceptable latency

·         Put different datafiles or different logs  on different disks in order to split activity on different disks

Useful resources:

Storage Top 10 Best Practices

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/bestpractice/storage-top-10.mspx

Deploying SQL Server 2005 with SAN #1

http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlcat/archive/2005/10/11/479887.aspx

SQL Server 2005 Configuration Blog #2.doc

http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlcat/archive/2005/11/21/495440.aspx

- Beatrice Nicolini -