For Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 you can download a Windows storport enhancement (packaged as a hotfix). This enhancement can lead to faster root cause analysis for slow IO issues. Once you apply this Windows hotfix you can use Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) via perfmon or xperf to capture more...

You may be sometimes seeing stuck/stalled IO messages on one or more of your SQL Server boxes. This is something it is important to understand so I am providing some background information on it. Here is the message you may see in the SQL error log: SQL Server has encountered xxx occurrence...

It is important to optimize TempDB for good performance. In particular, I am focusing on how to allocate files. TempDB is a unique database in several ways. The ones most relevant to this discussion are: · It is often one of the busiest databases on an instance. This means the performance...

If you are planning to use NetApp as the SAN for your SQL Server instance(s), take a look at these documents in addition to the normal SQL Server IO planning best practices documents. TR-3779 Sizing best practice guide. http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3779.pdf TR-3696 This is for the storage...