If you are dealing with older servers, a SAN should be faster (gigabit transfer rates vs Mbps.). With today's U320 drives and higher processor speeds, it's very difficult to compare performance. Short, bursty traffic doesn't seem to benefit from a SAN very much.. On large file transfers, many SANs will be quicker depending on the backend implementation. For example, EMC uses a multi-gigabyte cache on their Symmetrix systems. Makes for great read/write performance. adam "Braebaum, Neil" <Neil.Braebaum@littlew To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> oods.co.uk> cc: Sent by: Subject: [THIN] Re: Starting it all over thin-bounce@freelists. org 11/19/2004 10:59 AM Please respond to thin You touch on some of the issues with SAN booting. In some scenarios, booting off the SAN completely replaces local disk - therefore pagefile on the SAN. In some scenarios, a dedicated local disk is used. In others, no pagefile. Clearly much of that will depend on the scenario, and usage. But in fairness - SAN filesystems are used in very high-end environments, so pure performance should be possible, depending on the type of storage (ie T1, T2...). However, you still have the overhead of the NIC or HBA and associate additional costs for *system* activity for paging, above and slightly beyond what you may have with local storage. My gut feeling is that there may be some slight penalty for that, but I'm struggling to substantiate it - as, as I said, SAN supplied filesystems are used on high-end implementations where every last bit of performance is required - but implementation counts for a lot, there. Neil > -----Original Message----- > From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bernd Harzog > Sent: 19 November 2004 17:26 > To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > Subject: [THIN] Re: Starting it all over > > > Guys, > > I have a question (which I admit is rooted in my not knowing > much about SAN's). If you boot a server off of a SAN, where > does that server's page file reside? If it is on the SAN, > then what is the access speed of SAN storage relative to > leading edge IDE and SCSI access? The reason for the question > was that I had a talk recently with an architect of > Microsoft's internal TS farm, and he was very against booting > servers off of the SAN, since SAN speeds were far below those > of local hard disks in the server (he was actually looking a > using solid state hard drives for the page files). > > -----Original Message----- > From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On > Behalf Of Ron Oglesby > Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 11:42 AM > To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > Subject: [THIN] Re: Starting it all over > > Greg you can hit me offline, but in addition to some of that > I would look at throwing some Vmware in there from the start. > > -----Original Message----- > From: Greg Reese [mailto:gareese@xxxxxxxxx] > Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 9:54 AM > To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > Subject: [THIN] Starting it all over > > If you had to throw out your entire server setup and start > over, would you do differently a second time around. > > We have undergone recent changes here and I pretty much get > to do that after the first of the year. Exchange, SQL, > Firewall, Citrix, Windows servers, the whole entire > datacenter - gone. It all has to be redone from scratch and > it has to be done with an eye on future growth. > > I was thinking of moving it all to blades that boot from a > SAN. It's all standalone servers now. > > I'm just curious what the rest of you have run into that you > wish you could do differently if given the chance. > > Greg *********************************************** This e-mail and its attachments are confidential and are intended for the above named recipient only. If this has come to you in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this e-mail from your system. You must take no action based on this, nor must you copy or disclose it or any part of its contents to any person or organisation. Statements and opinions contained in this email may not necessarily represent those of Littlewoods. Please note that e-mail communications may be monitored. 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