The initial costs can be very high, depending on how many servers are connected to the NAS it may be more expensive than local storage for each server. Also, most of these systems tend to support backups off of their back-end, freeing the database server from worrying about backups. In addition, they usually have enough internal and network bandwidth to support multiple SQL Servers, which can lower the overall cost of storage for SQL Server, since each server can share the storage system and there tends to be less inaccessible space. These devices as a class are very fast, and offer most of the features that are normally expected of high-dollar storage systems, such as RAID, hot-swap drives and warm-spare drives. These devices can also do a lot for SQL Server. It's very easy to see that a NAS device would be very effective for doing things like traditional file services or storing static web pages.
Sql server file storage drivers#
It also doesn't require any "special" hardware, like a FibreChannel card, and it doesn't require any drivers that you wouldn't already be using. Given that a network card costs a relatively small amount of money, it is very inexpensive to have many servers access a storage area network device. A NAS device looks like a network server, and operates through the network layer instead of through the disk layer. A SAN is usually interconnected with FibreChannel or other similar technologies and relies on a front-end server to provide client services for the user, and is usually directly accessible as a disk device to Windows. NAS is not really a classic Storage Area Network, or SAN. In the case of SQL Server and Windows systems we're largely interested in devices that offer Windows-type file services (CIFS/SMB), but many NAS devices also offer NFS services for us Unix geeks. Network attached storage refers to a device that implements a large file system on a normal Ethernet network.
Sql server file storage how to#
Making SQL Server 7 use these devices is neither obvious nor straightforward, and this article attempts to explain what a NAS device is, what advantages it offers, and how to use it from SQL Server.
There are a large number of network attached storage devices that are on the market now ( Network Appliance) and that will be coming to market in the next few months.
0 kommentar(er)
