Nate Johnson shares a few things he picked up at the SQL Saturday in San Diego:
This was an interesting and even slightly entertaining session presented by Max @ SQLHA. One analogy that really stood out to me was this:
SANs have become a bit like the printer industry — You don’t pay a lot for the enclosure, the device itself, i.e. the SAN box & software; but you pay through the nose for ‘refills’, i.e. the drives that your SAN vendor gods deem worthy of their enclosure.
It’s frighteningly accurate. Ask your storage admin what it costs to add a single drive (or pair of drives, if you’re using something with built-in redundancy) to your SAN. Then compare that cost with the same exact drive off the retail market. It’s highway robbery. And we’re letting them get away with it because we can’t evolve fast enough to take advantage of storage virtualization tech (S2D, SOFS, RDMA) that effectively makes servers with locally attached SSDs a superior architecture. (As long as they’re not using a horribly outdated interface like SAS!)
Nate also includes several more interesting lessons. SQL Saturdays are great for picking up useful knowledge.
Thanks as always for the shout out!