Notice how we never ask for a specific number of disks when requesting a SAN allocation. Modern SAN equipment operates on an implied service level agreement based on installed components. In effect, if we need 6,000 IOPS and 10 TB of space, the SAN will combine disks, cache, and even SSDs if necessary, to match those numbers as closely as possible.
This not only reduces the amount of risky micromanagement we perform as DBAs, but it acts as an abstraction layer between storage and server. In this case, storage can be modified any number of ways, enhanced, adjusted, or copied, without affecting the database installation itself.
The main problem we encounter when using a SAN instead of several servers configured with local storage, ...
