Dell PowerEdge R510 - Manual (Page 11)

Dell R510 Reference Configuration for Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 R2 Fast Track Data Warehouse
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4 4 se1- v4 Data4 C:\ft\se1-v4
5 5 log1-v5 log C:\ft\log\SE1-log
Figure 5 represents the storage system configuration for the proposed Fast Track reference.
Figure 5. Storage System Components
Data file 1
Data file 2
Data file 3
Data file 4
Logs
User database Temp DB
SQL SERVER
Data file 1
Data file 2
Data file 3
Data file 4
Logs
Virtual disc group 1
Virtual disc group 2
Virtual disc group 3
Virtual disc group 4
Virtual disc group 5
INTERNAL STORAGE
RAID 1
RAID 1
RAID 1
RAID 1
RAID 1
The production, staging, and system temp databases were deployed per the recommendations provided
in the Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0 Reference Guide.
Performance Benchmarking
Microsoft Fast Track guidelines help to achieve optimized database architecture with balanced CPU and
storage bandwidth. The following sections describe the performance characterization activities carried
out for the validated Dell Microsoft Fast Track reference architecture.
Baseline Hardware Characterization using Synthetic I/O
You must thoroughly analyze the storage hardware to make sure that the storage backend is capable of
delivering the maximum possible throughput. This will ensure that the performance of the system is
not bottlenecked in any of the intermediate layers.
The disk characterization tool, SQLIO, was used to validate the configuration. Please refer to the Fast
Track Reference Guide (link provided in the reference section) for detailed guidelines. Figure 6 shows
the baseline performance numbers achieved for the validated reference architecture. The results show
the maximum baseline that the system can achieve from a cache called Line Rate. A small file is
placed on the storage, and large sequential reads are issued against it with SQLIO. This test verifies the
maximum bandwidth available in the system to ensure no bottlenecks are within the data path.