Sir Slicendice (1/12/2009)

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John Beggs (1/11/2009)Keep in mind though, sharing spindles doesn't have to be bad. If you know the work load of the other devices sharing the spindles, you can gain from sharing. Which would you rather have, 10 dedicated spindles for your 1tb db or 90 shared spindles? Depends on how much load the other members that are sharing the spindles will add.

And it depends on the access pattern of your application. If your pattern is a SQL-based data warehouse, where you see very large sequential transfers, the 10 spindles as direct-attach storage may well beat the 90 spindles on a SAN. (It can be very, very expensive or even impossible to match the bandwidth of the direct-attach storage in the SAN solution.) I didn't believe this until I actually saw it! Of course, if your application is a transaction processing app with lots of small disk accesses, the SAN will handily beat the direct-attach....