The last months I am more and more engaged in accounts who often experience serious performance issues. By the time I am called on to the scene, they status of the account is usually at a critical level. After I have done my research, I often write a report on what is causing the performance issues and what to do in order to solve it and hot to prevent it from happening again. I do this, what I call, "one man's squad team" kind of job for several years now. The environments I am engaged in, are getting bigger and bigger. I am talking here about Storage Area Networks (SAN's), ususally with Tera Bytes (TB) connected to tens and even hunderds of systems with tens of thousands of users. Analyzing these kinds of environments is more than just specialize on e.g. Windows, or storage, or network. It's the area that connects these technologies where problems arise. This is 999 out of a 1000 times, caused by lack of experience or to be more precise, understanding of the involved technologies when designing and implementing these environments. To give an example, consider the following:

You drive a truck, loaded with 2000 crates of pineapples and you need to transport them from point A to point B over a distance of 400 km with an average speed of 80 kph. You need to make a decision. A) you drive the truck via the beach (on the sand) or B) via the highway. Which one would you choose? It's obvious, right? option "B". Now image the following environment. You have a fully loaded file server with 1000 concurrent users and you need to choose between a file server connected to a storage solution with A) 3x 300 GB SCSI disks or b) 12x 75 GB SCSI disks. Which one would you choose? The answer depends who makes the decision. The person who owns the budget or the specialist who happens to know a bit about performance. In the field option "A" is chosen most of the time, because of the costing factor involved. Why is that important you think? The answer is as simple as it is obvious. You don't expect a truck to do 80 kph driving of the beach, but you do expect the truck to make 80 kph on a highway. Why do you expect 3x 300 GB SCSI disks to perform as well as 12x 75 GB SCSI disks? The point I am trying to make, is that most performance problems are caused by lack of proper insight on the technologies used (truck on the beach vs. a truck on the highway) results in degraded performance. Using our truck as example, the truck on the beach doesn't make 80 kph, so people want to buy a bigger one, or one with a bigger engine capacity, but most of people forget to consider, a beach is simply not the right environment for the truck to operate in. A truck loaded with 2000 crates of pineapples has other requirements than a buggy loaded with just one crate of pineapples. A buggy happens to thrive well on a beach, the truck needs a proper infrastructure in order to complete its task. A decent highway, preferably without traffic jams. The same applies to servers who need to serve a lot of clients at the same time. A truck is made to transport many things at the same time instead of just one thing very fast. if you want that, buy a Ferrari instead.

A server is designed to serve many clients at the same time instead of completing one task very fast. Then why don't you give it the means to do so?

In my next post on this topic, I will discuss some Windows performance considerations on a technical level.