We just bought an IBM x3850 7143-B7U server, with a pair of Intel 4870 CPU's, 8x300GB DAS (2 RAID10 arrays), and 256GB RAM (32x8GB, in hemisphere mode). It is a SQL server not yet in production. I have local drives C/D/E, and Netapp SAN drives R/S/T. I have SQL 2008 SP3CU4 configured to use only about 240GB of the RAM, and task manager shows Total=262080MB, Cached=~33400MB, Available=~33000MB, Free=0MB. All the CPU cores are basically idle, and so is the LAN. When I copied a 30GB trans log from E: to T:, I received throughput around 300MB/s. I am currently copying a 80GB mdb file from S: to R:, and the speed has ranged between 14-30MB/s. How can I isolate the bottleneck?

Check your SAN bestpractice to setup your NIC and Switch with all the option needed. (I assume it's a iSCSI there)MCP | MCTS 70-236: Exchange Server 2007, Configuring

Here is a similar discussion which you might want to take a look. You might as well want to try some of the suggestions mentioned in that discussion. Windows 2008 R2 File and Folder Copy Paste very slow over 1000 MB/s LAN http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsserver2008r2general/thread/2e14aa58-cb9b-462c-8a9e-7b10be2de3cb Netapp SAN - what kind of SAN is that, iSCSI or FC ? I would also suggest you to check the firmware level of the Server as well as SAN and update the latest firmwares if needed/available. Just as an alternative and for testing, you might want to use Robocopy for file transfers and see if that makes any difference.If it looks good, Eat it ! Likewise, If you don't know the answers, don't hesitate to ask questions !! This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties or guarantees and confers no rights. About Me !!!

I believe it's a NetApp 2050, definitely using FC although our legacy Cisco switch only supports 2Gb. The Netapp console is showing it's using 'PartnerPath', which our NetApp guy says it shouldn't be because we're using their Windows Host Utilities. This might require a NetApp call. I've completely upgraded the firmware and drivers on the server, and then installed NetApp's recommended driver/firmware on the Emulex 8Gb FC HBA.

You might as well want to post this in Netapp communities, where in you would likely to get some more insight on this aspect. Couple of similar discussions from Netapp community... lun latency increasing https://communities.netapp.com/message/24794#24794 Window NTFS fragmentation + File system full degrade performance? https://communities.netapp.com/message/15554#15554 If it looks good, Eat it ! Likewise, If you don't know the answers, don't hesitate to ask questions !! This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties or guarantees and confers no rights. About Me !!!