What This Chapter Is About

This chapter explores the world of storing and efficiently accessing the volumes of data in SAP systems, with special focus on storage system design of the database server. There are four sections in this chapter, including performance, availability, scalability and managing growth, as well as a section on disk layout for optimum database server performance.

The first section on disk and storage basics covers the disk I/O patterns business applications generate, the disk drive performance characteristics, and the disk I/O interface technologies, including Storage Area Networks (SANs). The section on availability covers the basic redundancy principles, RAID technologies, file systems, and data replication methods. The scalability and managing growth section presents an innovative way to size a storage system for performance, introduces the typical storage systems' characteristics, and explains the need for data archiving to manage data growth. The last section offers some ideas on database layout considerations for SAP systems.