Optimal SQL Server Performance: Intel® Optane™ SSD vs. FC SAN

Description

Evaluator Group was asked to evaluate the performance and availability of features of two different storage solutions when used for SQL Server based applications. Our criteria included availability and reliability, along with price and performance. Our testing found that using local Intel® Optane™ SSD NVMe media, together with Microsoft Windows Failover Clustering and SQL Server Always on Availability delivered an HA solution that meets enterprise availability and performance requirements significantly better than using a traditional, all-flash enterprise class FC storage array.

Findings include:

• Intel Optane SSD outperformed an all-flash FC SAN storage system, yielding 4.3X the performance
• Intel Optane SSD enabled a 77% reduction in cost per transaction compared to all-flash FC SAN storage
• All configurations, including Intel Optane SSD configurations were high-availability SQL Server deployments