Myrick, Todd (NIH/CC/DCRI) [E] wrote:
Some of my opinions based on my own research.
1. I prefer hot swappable hardware RAID 1 for all boot / system
partitions no matter what the role of the server is. To me this
gives the fastest disaster recovery option for situations you are
unsure about with regards to OS updates and single drive
failures. On a side note we used to use three mirrors for our
domain controller setups. 1 for system/boot/syslog, 1 for
transaction logs, and 1 for data. We mirrored this after our
exchange setup, except in Exchange we used RAID 5 arrays to store
the data.
2. With regards to number of spindles and performance, I discussed
this with someone on the list before (Guido) and people at HP and
we came to the conclusion that with the latest 15K drives you
won’t see any tangible performance improvements going with
multiple mirrors unless you DC’s service more than 5000 people in
that location where the DC resides.
I had a feeling that 15K drives wouldn't buy me much. After some reading
last night I'm even more convinced. For our size I think I'll be going
with 2 mirror sets and as much memory as we can afford.
3. Judging from the original posters SMTP information, it looks like
his organization has less than 5000 people in it, so I recommend
his first option.
While my 'organization' has less that 5000 employees we can have from
1-4000 visitors here at any time. With the Accelerator running (as it is
now) we'll be crowded for the next 1.5 years.
Follow-up thoughts looking for group input.
With regards to when is it best to use Software RAID, I have debated
this with several people and I seem to favor this approach in Virtual
Server Environments and using it on the System/Boot Partition for DR
purposes. Another possible use for the software based mirroring might
be to create live copy of server for duplication purposes (personally I
think there are much better approaches out there.) Any thoughts on this?
What Disk type do you all recommend? I currently still stick to the
Basic Disk for the most part. (Unless I want to use software based
fault-tolerance).
We use basic for most for the most part. The only time I use dynamic is
when I have to create a large (>5TB) volume on some of the SATA boxes
that we have that host some large-ish SQL databases.
al
--
Al Lilianstrom
CD/CSS/CSI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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