Lots of us have Storage Area Networks (SANs). Most of us, probably. How do you go about optimizing for speed? How many spindles do you have? iSCSI or FC? How do you break up your array? And if you have an EMC SAN, what do you do with the first four drives that share the stupid Flare OS?
Looking for input from anyone who has put effort into speeding up their SAN to make disk access more timely and reliable.
Honestly, this is almost as broad as asking "how do you make your servers fast".
In your case you want to start spending a lot of time with NaviAnalyzer. Get familiar with your IOPS, queue depths, service times, and bandwidth metrics (though its rarely the issue). EMC also has some elearning courses that you can usually get the sales rep to throw in for free with whatever your next purchase is going to be.
Speeding things up is more a question of avoiding screw ups (like partition alignment or bad stripe sizes) than improving things. After that its only oversimplifying things a little to say that ultimately its spindles spindles spindles.
