Has anyone any reasons to recommend a 15K SAN External RAID NAS. If so why and what model of External RAID NAS would you recommend & Hard Drives.
Because, I know SQL can go through the disk space quite fast given that my SQL Instance would have Production, Demo, Pilot, Test, BarTender, DotNetIT_ConnectCX, SSRS Databases, Epicor Social among other things.
At this time we only have about 30 active employees - We would like to continue to use the Epicor 9 Recommended Hardware which worked great with Progress and it should continue to work great with MS SQL.
Unfortunately at this time our Main Server will have to run both the AppServer and SQL - because the secondary server just does not cut it. So I was told that buying an external 15K SAN NAS would be ideal for SQL while leaving the internal 15K SAN’s for the AppServers. Thoughts?
A NAS is not at all what you want. There are significant performance differences/implications between a NAS and SAN and how they each handle storage at the physical level. At 30 users a SAN would be overkill. Configured properly with bare min 10k drives in a RAID10 or SSD in a single box you should be more than covered.
I don’t know your company growth plan, but at base do not do a NAS or Drobo. And SAN will be overkill.
Joshua Giese
CTO
920.437.6400 x342
Wisconsin Converting Inc.
I would consider looking at NVME Cards. This option is one mentioned in the Hardware sizing guide (it was the last time I looked). They are cheaper than a SAN and less overhead from an administration perspective. I agree with Joshua, NAS is not what you want, alright for a a development environment if you can use iSCSI targets.
We are using intel P3700 2Tb although these have been superseded now.
You mentioned database growth. I would be making sure your SQL maintenance plans are working correctly, and transaction log backups are occurring on a regular enough interval to help control that.
Location of the SQL data, SQL logs and the EpicorData folder can also affect disk performance. What we have observed since we implemented is that if you use install the client on PCs that just meets the specification you will get a really poor user experience. Recently we have been installing on new hardware i5, 8GB RAM and even over our WAN we see near local network responses. Run it on an older machine and the users moan about the speed.
So whilst you may think it is SQL and your app server it may be useful to look around and see what other issues may be adding to the problem.
Without knowing your specific current hardware configuration it is hard to judge how well you are situated.
E10 is much less server intensive than E9 and earlier versions, so some relatively minor upgrades may be all you need.
I agree with the others that a NAS is not something you want to hang your SQL database on, they are not know for having good IOPS, a true SAN would be more appropriate but you may not even need that.
Depending on your disk controller and how many drive bays you have as well as the size and RPM of the drives you may be able to configure a decent performing server.
I also agree that you could possibly add an SSD card to your server which is screaming fast.
Neil