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Large Database Disk Layout and Data Management

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SP
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1/18/2012 3:07 PM
    We are in the middle of upgrading our HW / OS / DB to Windows 2008 w/ SQL Server 2008 and are looking for recommendations and/or experience from people with relatively large Lawson databases.

    I would love to hear from people running SQL Server with terabytes of data as we will be at the terabyte mark very quickly if we keep 5 other non-production productlines refreshed with full copies of production.

    The plan is to bring up the new hardware in two clusters on two machines in an active/passive mode for both Lawson apps and SQL Server, where one server is active for the db, and the other for the apps.

    We allot one drive for virtual memory on each box, one for the OS, and one for the quorum drives.  Lawson apps, websphere, etc.. all reside on one drive.  That is a total of 7 drive letters already used before allocating drives to SQL Server data, logs, backups, etc...  That leaves 19 drives to allocate to the data storage (I know SQL 2008 supports mount points, but I would rather not use them if I can prevent it)

    Here are some questions I have:

    How would you recommend breaking out the database files assuming 3 copies of production data on the production db server (250Gb/yr growth per prodline
    (i.e. number of files, across x-number of disks, etc...)

    Does anyone have experience with Lawson and virtual databases (i.e.using Lawson with sparse files)?

    If you have large databases, how do you manage requests for data refreshes?  If you built a sophisticated approach, what was the level of effort?

    Jimmy Chiu
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    1/19/2012 3:23 PM
      We are running close to 400GB per prodline. How big is yours?
      SP
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      1/19/2012 4:44 PM
        Jimmy,

        We are looking at about 250Gb of additional growth per year. That will put us around the 300Gb of year in growth for each productline.

        We are exploring the possibility of testing a SQLsafe solution from Idera or some other virtual database management software (Compellent0. If SQLsafe snapshots will work with Lawson then it will be possible for us to only need one complete copy of our data for any given environment. The other productlines will use the SQLsafe or Compellent equivalent of SQL Server virtual databases. Obviously we need to test patches that change tables, refreshes, etc...but it appears to be a very good solution if we can make it work. Imagine a 10 minute complete refresh of 400Gb database. Oh Happy Days!!
        Jimmy Chiu
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        Posts: 641
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        1/19/2012 6:57 PM
          My database server currently is doing:
          ~4 minutes full backup, ~30 minutes full restore.
          differential backup/restore ~1-2 minutes.

          250GB of data growth/yr is quite massive I must say. I would probably test enabling page compression in SQL 2008 R2 and see what kind of yield I would get from it.