Re: SAN vs Internal Disks

On Fri, Sep 07, 2007 at 12:26:23AM -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
>consider is this:  your SAN starts having funky problems, and your
>database is down because of it.  You call the vendor.  They find out
>you're running CentOS instead of RHEL and say that's the cause of your
>problem (even though it probably isn't).  How much will such a passing the
>buck problem cost your company?  If it's a significant number, you'd be
>foolish to run CentOS instead of the real RHEL.  Some SAN vendors can be
>very, very picky about what they will support, and for most business
>environments the RHEL subscription isn't so expensive that it's worth
>wandering into an area where your support situation is fuzzy just to save
>that money.

Correct. Far more sensible to skip the expensive SAN solution, not worry
about having to play games, and save *even more* money.

SANs have their place, but postgres storage generally isn't it; you'll
get more bang/buck with DAS and very likely better absolute performance
as well.  SANs make sense if you're doing a shared filesystem (don't
even think about doing this with postgres), or if you're consolidating
backups & DR (which doesn't work especially well with databases).

Mike Stone