Building a Raw Data Warehouse in SQL Server 2005 - Part 2
The hardware you chose to power a Data Warehouse (or any database for that mater) is another crucial building block in how effective your database (and project) will be. Let’s take a look into the hardware of the example, real world, project. I promise to be less wordy in this post while trying to deliver more content.
Server infrastructure
3 HP server node Windows cluster of:
- Quad (4) Intel 2.4 Xeon Processors
- 8GB ram
- Fiber attached SAN
The SAN is comprised of 20 disks. 10 of the disks are configured as RAID 5 for Data, 5 are configured for RAID 1/0 for logs, and 5 are configured as RAID 1/0 for the tempdb. The reason why you want to do this is to leverage the faster writing ability with RAID 1/0 and designate that to the logging & tempdb partitions. The data partition is assigned to a RAID 5 array, leveraging the read advantage of that configuration.
I’m not much of a SAN techie, but the people who are (EMC folks, hired subcontractors, etc.) have built the SAN shelves to “industry standard.” I wish I could give you more insight on Lun configuration and SAN switching, but I’m not going to make a fool out of myself.
There’s not much else I can say about the hardware. Just make sure if you are running a production server you invest time into system High Availability (HA). This project has covered this base by building the cluster and using RAID disks which will keep the system online during hardware failures.