Because we're going to cover both SAN performance and storage allocation, we recommend referring to the Having enough IOPS and Sizing storage recipes. Just like physical disks, we need to know how much space we need, and roughly how fast it should be to fulfill our transaction and query requirements.
Do we need a SAN? We can ask ourselves a few questions:
- Do our IOPS or storage requirements demand more than 20 hard drives?
- Will the size of our database reach or exceed 3TB within the next three years?
- Would the risk to the company be too high if we ever ran out of space?
- Is there already a SAN available for testing?
If we answer yes to any of these, a SAN might be in our best interests. In that case, we can determine if it ...
