Without making enemies on the SAN team, how can I reassure myself and the application developers that our SQL servers aren't suffering from poorly configured storage? Just use perfmon stats? Other benchmarks like sqlio?
In short, there probably isn't a way to be truly sure. What I would say (I am a SAN admin), is that if your applications are performing up to your expectations, don't worry about it. If you start to see performance issues that you believe could be related to SAN/Disk IO performance, then it might be wise to inquire. I do not use much HP storage like you do, but in the IBM/NetApp world I can say from experience that there aren't many options which would allow you to configure it "poorly". Most enterprise storage these days takes a lot of the guesswork out of building raid arrays, and doesn't really let you do it wrong. Unless they are mixing drive speeds and capacities within the same raid groups you can rest-assured in most cases that your disk is performing fine.
If I load test on these SAN drives, does that really give me a reliable, repeatable measure of what I will see when we go live? (assuming that the SAN software might "dynamically configure" differently at different points in time.)
Load testing should be plenty reliable. Just keep in mind that when you are load testing one box, that being on a shared SAN/Disk Array that its performance can (and will) be affected by other systems using the same storage.
Does heavy IO in one part of the SAN (say the Exchange server) impact my SQL servers? (assuming they aren't giving dedicated disks to each server, which I've been told they are not)
It can. It is not all about the disks, or which disks, the servers are on. All of the data is being served up via a disk controller, and then a SAN switch. The performance you will see greatly depends on how the disk controller is connected to is corresponding disk shelves, and the corresponding SAN. If the entire array connects to the backbone SAN on one single strand of 4gbps fiber, then clearly the performance will be impacted. If the array is connected across two redundant SAN's which are load balanced, using trunked links, then it would impossible for exchange alone to suck up too much bandwidth. Another thing which needs to be considered is how many IO/sec the array is capable of. As long as the array and the SAN it is connected to are scaled correctly, heavy IO in other parts of the SAN environment should not impact your SQL performance.
Would requesting separating logical drives for different functions logical drives (data vs log vs tempdb) help here? Would the SAN see the different IO activity on these and optimally configure them differently?
That is probably a matter of preference, and also greatly depends on how your storage admins configure it. They could give you three LUNs in the same array or volume, in which case its all the same anyway. If they gave you individual LUNs on different arrays, in different volumes (physically different disks), then it might be worth it for you to separate them.
We're in a bit of a space crunch right now. Application teams being told to trim data archives, etc. Would space concerns cause the SAN team to make different decisions on how they configure internal storage (RAID levels, etc) that could impact my server's performance?
I don't imagine your storage admin would change the raid level in order to free up space. If he would, then he should probably be fired. Space concerns can lead things to be configured differently, but not normally in a performance-impacting way. They might just become a little more tight about how much space they give you. They might enable features such as data de-duplication (if the array supports it) which can hinder the performance of the array while the process runs, but not around the clock.
After some more research (checking waits and running the site with peak traffic), the "problem" described above was actually not a problem.
The problem appeared when we removed a bottleneck (the old log storage). So when we got faster disks for the tranaction logs the data disks could handle more transactions / sec and therefore the queue length increased.
It also explain why disk idle time was good.
The "disk time"-counter seems to be pretty much useless for a fast disk system (using cache etc).
Best Answer
My guess would be to:
For performance only: RAID 0 (this would be seen as only 1 disk having a total storage space of 1168GB;
For performance, but with data resilience: RAID 5+0 (Min. 6 disks required), or you could also opt for a RAID 1+0 configuration, making 4 pairs of RAID 1, and making an array of 4x2 disks in RAID 0;
For a total storage space of 584GB that will be seen as one only disk because of the RAID 0 stripping feature.
In 3, if you prefer to have a hot spare disk, than RAID 0+5 could become handy.
EDIT #1
After having read your suggestion for a 2-4-2 disk configuration, I guess this wouldn't be needed. I would personally favor a RAID 1+0 configuration as above-illustrated. I don't think the gain will be that much, since you have 8 disks of the same speed. This would have been different if you would have had two disks slower than the 6 others, then I would have considered using those two for the OS. But as of the current situation, I guess the gain would be negligeable.
Furthermore, it is much negigeable if your DBAs or programmers create the right indexes for the right data within their database. Having four disks that fast stripping together, and assuring the resilience through RAID 1, I believe you won't have trouble this way.
I hope this helps! =)
Does this help?