topic sas storage solution in Administration and Deployment

sas storage solution

woo — Wed, 15 May 2019 16:11:38 GMT

we are running with sas 9.4 m6 on rhel 7. We already have one nfs drive for users which is like 60 TB where users save data for x years and asking for more, is it good idea to add more storage under same nfs mount or have another mount for old data storage and use existing one for current data which needs to be process for efficient I/O and all?

Re: sas storage solution

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 16 May 2019 08:55:00 GMT

First of all, I would not use NFS at all in a production environment for SAS datasets, as the performance of NFS is not suited for that. And the bandwidth occupied by storage will negatively impact your other network traffic (HTTP for SAS Studio, COM for EG). If you do not use internal storage (eg Serial Attached SCSI), go for a fibre-channel based SAN.

That said, there are two ways to deal with "old" data. You can move it to less performant infrastructure, or you can move it to long-time archival storage, which is provided by all major backup solutions like CommVault, Spectrum Protect (ex TSM), and many others.

Moving it to the tape archive is what we do. If such data is required, it only takes a few minutes for retrieval, and the data does not occupy disk space and does not clutter up our libraries while not needed.

Re: sas storage solution

SimonDawson — Thu, 16 May 2019 10:32:19 GMT

@woo there are a few things to think about there. Your post hasn't provided much in the way of specific details so I don't think you'll get many specific suggestions. A system/storage administrator at your site is probably going to be better placed to work with you to understand the workload the current SAS environment puts on the storage and suggest a path forward that will optimally provide more space.

Generally speaking the more spindles you can get to back a file system the higher IOPS and throughput you'll get. If your solution to adding more space involves adding more drives then adding them to the same file system would see the throughput increase. If you combined the new spindles to make a new file system you'd likely have two slightly slower file systems.

Like I mentioned up the top this is very generic advice since you don't have specifics about the situation there. Hopefully one of your storage appliance admins can work with you to optimize the configuration you go for to suite the workload.

Re: sas storage solution

woo — Thu, 16 May 2019 14:09:47 GMT

Thank you Kurt and Simon. appreciate your insights. unfortunately we have nfs storage and infect we are facing different challenges when it comes to IO and all different Application performance. we are looking into different options at the moment.

Please let me know if you can recommend any good SAS papers to read...Thank you.

Re: sas storage solution

SimonDawson — Fri, 17 May 2019 04:42:01 GMT

Personally I found the Optimizing SAS on Red Hat Enterprise Linux particularly interesting.
https://access.redhat.com/articles/1593123

Also the book from Brendan Gregg "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud". I enjoyed that too.

Re: sas storage solution

woo — Mon, 20 May 2019 15:45:58 GMT

Thank you so much Simon. I finished that article, very useful. will look out for book as well,

Re: sas storage solution

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Re: sas storage solution

Sajid01 — Sat, 15 May 2021 12:09:37 GMT

Hello @woo
Under your situation, the immediate solution will be to add a second drive and archive what is not needed.

About the 60 TB nfs drive, if it is being used for direct read/write by SAS programs, then please have a review of your storage solution as suggested @SimonDawson .

Re: sas storage solution

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