I am working on designing requirements for new SQL Server installation. I have been researching disk storage and everything seemed to point to using RAID.
However, I found this article, which suggests RAID is no longer relevant today.
Can anyone point me in the direction of where I can learn about the latest disk storage for SQL Server.
Before jumping at one article you should do a little research, after a short Google search "windows storage pools vs raid" I found this article which goes more in-depth. As far as I can tell this new tech doesn't completely replace raid but could be considered an alternative to raid ONLY if you are using windows server 2012. It also may not make sense if you already have the hardware to support hardware raid as (I'm guessing) using this new storage mechanism will increase the cpu/memory loads on your server since it has to do the storage calculations in software. So I wouldn't say RAID is no longer relevant, it just has some healthy competition.
As in the original article you linked:
The question here is this: if you’re not segregating the workload at the physical resource level, is there any need to segregate the workloads at the logical level? For example, if tempdb and my user databases are in a single pool of disk on the array, should I bother having them on multiple LUNs (Logical Disks) on the host?
For a high-performance SQL Server, you need separate physical resources. For safety, you need multiple instances. RAID 10 is usually recommended. For local storage on a physical server, use RAID arrays for anything but pet projects.
Bigger systems will use SAN systems, larger budgets, and usually a SAN administrator who can tune thing to your workload.
As a DBA, I would not use Storage Spaces for a SQL Server. That may change later as the technology matures.
