Monica Rathbun gives us a primer on storage concepts:
“One Gerbil, Two Gerbils or Three Gerbils?” is a common DBA joke about server and storage performance. No matter how many gerbils power your storage, you need to know what type they are and the power that they provide. Storage is not about gerbils it is about IOPs, bandwidth, latency, and tiers.
As a DBA it is important for you to understand and know what kind of storage is attached to your servers and how it is handling your data. It is not important to master everything about it, but it is very advantageous to be able to talk to your storage admins or “Gerbil CoLo, LLC” provider intelligently especially when you experience performance issues. Here is a list of things to I encourage you to know and ask.
Click through for the cheat sheet.