What is faster Asynchronous SAN Replication or Asynchronous AAG?

Question

If copying data from one datacenter to another, what would generally be the faster approach to propagate that data to the target datacenter, SAN Replication or AAG, i.e. block-level or transaction-level, assuming the network, bandwidth and all other factors are excellent and the same for either method? Both would be asynchronous.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Let me make one thing clear before we go any further.

... SAN Replication or AAG, i.e. block-level or transaction-level

AlwaysOn Availability Groups do not work at the transaction level. The unit of work is at the log block level. This is very different as we ship log blocks for all transactions, whether they are committed or not.

The most likely "fastest" shipping mechanism would be the SAN replication given the parameters set forth and given the current versions of SQL Server generally available. This is only taking into account the literal question of "what method makes my data get to the other end the in the least amount of time?".