because the latency and I/O pattern favored by these drives are a good match for the Analysis Services storage engine workload. The question is how to make the best use of the storage for your Analysis Services instance. Apart from performance and capacity, the following factors must also be considered when designing the disk volumes for Analysis Services: Is clustering of the Analysis Services instance required? Will you be building a scaled-out environment? Consult the subsections that follow for guidance in these specific setups. However, the following general guidance applies. SAN Mega LUNs: If you are a SAN, your storage administrator may be able to provision you a single, large LUN for your cubes. Unless you plan to build a consolidation environment, having such a single, mega-LUN is probably the easiest and most manageable way to provision your storage. First of all, it provides the IOPS as a general resource to the server. Secondly, and additional advantage of a LUN is that you can easily disk align this in Windows Server 2003. For Windows Server 2008 you do not need to worry about disk alignment on newly created volumes. Windows Server dynamic disk stripes: Using Disk Manager it is possible to combine multiple LUNs into a single Windows volume. This is a very simple way to combine multiple, similarly sized, similarly performing LUNs into a single mount point or drive letter. We have tested dynamic disk stripes in Windows Server 2008 R2 all the way up to 100.000 IOPS and the performance overhead to that level is – negligible. Note: You cannot use dynamic disk stripes in a cluster. This is discussed in greater detail later in this guide. letters versus mount points: Both drive letters and mount points will work with Analysis Services cubes. If the server is dedicated to a single Analysis Services instance, a drive letter may be the simplest solution. Choosing drive letters versus mount points is often a matter of personal preference, or it can be driven by the standards of your operations team. From the perspective of performance, one is not superior to the other. AllowedBrowsingFolders: Remember that in order for a directory to be visible to administrators of Analysis Services in SQL Server Management Studio, it must be listed in AllowedBrowsingFolders, which is available in SQL Server Management Studio by clicking Server Properties and then Advanced Properties. Figure 8 AllowedBrowsingFolders –
because the latency and I/O pattern favored by these drives are a good match for the Analysis Services storage engine workload. The question is how to make the best use of the storage for your Analysis Services instance. Apart from performance and capacity, the following factors must also be considered when designing the disk volumes for Analysis Services: Is clustering of the Analysis Services instance required? Will you be building a scaled-out environment? Consult the subsections that follow for guidance in these specific setups. However, the following general guidance applies. SAN Mega LUNs: If you are a SAN, your storage administrator may be able to provision you a single, large LUN for your cubes. Unless you plan to build a consolidation environment, having such a single, mega-LUN is probably the easiest and most manageable way to provision your storage. First of all, it provides the IOPS as a general resource to the server. Secondly, and additional advantage of a is that you can easily disk align this in Windows Server 2003. For Windows Server 2008 you do not need to worry about disk alignment on newly created volumes. Windows Server dynamic disk stripes: Using Disk Manager it is possible to combine multiple LUNs into a single Windows volume. This is a very simple way to combine multiple, similarly sized, similarly performing LUNs into a single mount point or drive letter. We have tested dynamic disk stripes in Windows Server 2008 R2 all the way up to 100.000 IOPS – and the performance overhead to that level is negligible. Note: You cannot use dynamic disk stripes in a cluster. This is discussed in greater detail later in this guide. letters versus mount points: Both drive letters and mount points will work with Analysis Services cubes. If the server is dedicated to a single Analysis Services instance, a drive letter may be the simplest solution. Choosing drive letters versus mount points is often a matter of personal preference, or it can be driven by the standards of your operations team. From the perspective of performance, one is not superior to the other. AllowedBrowsingFolders: Remember that in order for a directory to be visible to administrators of Analysis Services in SQL Server Management Studio, it must be listed in AllowedBrowsingFolders, which is available in SQL Server Management Studio by clicking Server Properties and then Advanced Properties. Figure 8 – AllowedBrowsingFolders LUN
SSASOpsGuide2008R2.docx