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All applications you build store data in some way or another. It has become vital for enterprises to increase efficiency and reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for data storage as well as all other infrastructure components.
Many factors must be considered when planning storage: Do you need data to be available 24 hours a day? What recovery times can you accept if data is compromised in any way? How much will your data grow with time? Are you using your data storage architecture effectively as it is?
It is not only your applications that need to be designed carefully. When it comes to storing data, you need to weigh an increasing number of issues, not only for the application you are currently building, but also for the entire enterprise data storage design. Considering how much important data is actually stored at a given company, it is surprising that many do not take it as seriously as they should.
Many enterprises create new database servers for almost every new application. This has resulted in data being scattered all over such companies and storage areas not being fully utilized. The scattered data has made manageability harder and more costly than it should be. By not using data storage effectively, a lot of investment is wasted, costing money in the long run.
Availability, scalability, and security have been emphasized throughout this book. These topics are important not only when building applications, but also when it comes to designing storage architecture. You can use various technologies to increase these aspects of an application, but they have some trade-offs that you need to consider. Availability always costs money. Redundant technology comes with a rather hefty price tag, and this is true in development and in data storage alike. When you try to increase scalability, availability can suffer. This requires you to purchase even more hardware to avoid problems.
Security most often affects performance and manageability due to the added overhead and complexity of secure solutions. The more you tighten security, the more performance and manageability suffers as a direct result.
You need to design your storage solution to meet goals of lowered TCO, high availability, great scalability, tight security, and, of course, simplified management. That is quite a lot to live up to, as you can see. When you design your storage solution, you must plan for enabling your organization to quickly create new business applications, and at the same time provide security and minimize the potential of data loss. You must also make sure new applications can be implemented with minimum disruption to your existing business. The decisions you make for the data storage architecture have an impact on how you design your future business projects.
The tasks facing a data storage team are not easy ones, so first we will take a look at some of the technologies for storing data and see how they can ease the burden. Then we will move on to choosing and implementing a logical design for a storage system before diving into SQL Server.
This chapter will explore the most common storage technologies available to you. It will also present some benefits and concerns about different storage designs so that you can more easily choose what suits your solution. We will finish the chapter with a presentation of SQL Server—examining its architecture and how it fits into your storage policy.
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