6 Tips for Improving Storage System Performance

1. Connectivity – Make sure bottlenecks to do not exist within your SAN fabric. or Storage array. Often clients who have 4Gbps Storage systems connecting to 2Gbps SAN switches or HBA's. A smart idea is to quickly review all pieces of your SAN fabric  and the Storage controller ports to identify potential bottlenecks and eliminate them right away.
2. Drive Count – Storage array performance can be often fixed by adding additional disk drives to the storage configuration within the RAID group. The reason this fix works is that by spreading out the workload with the newly added disks, you gain the advantage of having more drives/arms/spindles accessing and retrieving data, and feeding that data to the storage controller to deliver faster I/O.
3. Drive Size – By using smaller & faster drives for high performance environments such as Oracle, you avoid disk drive contention(s). Contention can manifest itself when too much data is placed on larger drives. An example would be trying to place 4TB of data on 1 shelf of 14x 300GB drives or 1 shelf of 14X450GB drives.
4. Drive Type – SATA drives are an excellent format for archive or low I/O applications such as file servers or imaging, but become less ideal for larger VMWare, Oracle,  Exchange or high intensive I/O environments. Make sure you invest in the right technology according to application/workload & follow the best practices effort for implementation.
5. Controller Segregation – As storage requirements continue to grow, small storage shops can eventually grow into large storage shops. If multiple high performance applications are placed on a single modular array it may overwhelm the system. Consider a second array or a tiered architecture should your array have a high combination of performance-oriented application.
6. RAID Level – Raid 10, Raid 1, Raid 6, RAID-DP, Raid5 and other parity combination's all have their strength and limitations. Do your research to make sure the RAID configuration you are considering will support and maintain application performance for the long term.