Hi Tom, I hope you do mind if I throw in my two cents. I strongly agree with Charlie. HP Proliant controllers are rock solid, I really like the 5304 controllers and the newer replacement 6404. In answer to your question, yes you can have multiple raid arrays off the same controller, and in fact since a 5304 controller is a 4 channel controller it is best to separate the arrays by having each on it's own channel. I have had two Compaq controllers fail in my 10 years of supporting Proliant servers one in 1997 on a SMART 2DH Raid controller and the second was here at ADP with a 5304 controller. In both cases Compaq / HP gave excellent support and with the 5304 controller I was able to swap it out and recover the array with out having to restore from backup not to mention that they also had a replacement delivered with in 4 hours. My only recommendation is to make sure you keep your controller firmware up to date.
So with that said, running RAID 10 for your transaction logs is ideal and even better for your data store, however if you have a small environment then RAID 5 is fine as long as it is done on a hardware based SCSI raid controller and not in the Operating System. Regards, Jose Medeiros Former Vice President and Postmaster NTEA MCP+I, MCSE, NT4 MCT www.ntea.net www.tvnug.org www.sfntug.org ---------------------------------------------- -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Charlie Kaiser Sent: Monday, July 11, 2005 9:09 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] exchange upgrade (OT) We use a DL380 with 6 drives for our E2K3 server. One RAID 1 set for OS/Logs, one 3-drive RAID 5 set for the DBs, and a hot spare available to both arrays. Given our E2K3 org size (single server, DB of around 17gb, under 200 mailboxes, low PF usage), this setup works fine. We only use one controller. The HP controllers have been pretty durable for us. We've had issues with system boards or backplanes, but the controllers have not given us any flak. You have to balance cost and probability of failure with the desire for a second controller card. I'd base it on my SLA and uptime needs for E2K3. Eliminating a single point of failure (as in a single controller) is desirable, but in the end, if you lose one of your controllers, you're still going to go down for a while. If I had a larger E2K3 org and needed more drives (as in RAID 10 or 0+1), I would consider the DAS cabinet that HP offers along with a second controller. We use them for some of our other systems and they have been fine. I seem to remember that the price point between the DAS cabinet + DL380 vs a larger server with more internal storage worked in favor of the DAS cabinet... That was over a year ago, though. We looked at going to a SAN at the time and decided that SAN architecture and cost was well outside the scope of an E2K3 migration project. ********************** Charlie Kaiser MCSE, CCNA Systems Engineer Essex Credit / Brickwalk 510 595 5083 ********************** > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kern, Tom > Sent: Monday, July 11, 2005 8:50 AM > To: ActiveDir (E-mail) > Subject: [ActiveDir] exchange upgrade (OT) > > I'm moving to exchange 2k3 and i'm starting off with a fresh > new server > > We use HP proliant DL's here. > > My questions are - > I want to use raid 0+1 or raid 10(deoending on price) for the > trans logs. > I want to keep the exchange binaries and db seperate from the > logs on a raid 5. > > To do this, do i need 2 raid controllers or can i just do this with 1? > alos the proliants seem to only support 6 drives and for this > solution i will need at least 7. > Has anyone had experince with doing this on proliants with > the smart array 6i controller? > > Thanks a lot > List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx > List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx > List archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ > List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/
