I didn't mean to imply dedicated spindles. What I meant was that logs and stores should not share spindles, and that Exchange servers should not share spindles with each other.
Obviously, the other applications that you share spindles with should not be IO intensive. File server files, User home directories, your MP3 collection - those are the kinds of things you want sharing your Exchange spindles. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ed Crowley [MVP] Sent: Friday, April 16, 2004 2:14 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Exchange 2k3 & SANs Dedicated spindles on a SAN are a huge waste of money. When you have to dedicate a pair of 340GB drives to a single set of logs, SANs become terribly expensive, especially when you add the pro-rata cost of the fiber network, adapters, etc. When you get to the point that you're carving everything up into dedicated physical volumes, you're better off just using locally attached storage because you'll save a ton of money. You should determine the I/O rate you need the SAN to sustain and let the SAN engineer figure out how to lay out the data. Ed Crowley MCSE+Internet MVP Freelance E-Mail Philosopher Protecting the world from PSTs and Bricked Backups!T -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ken Cornetet Sent: Friday, April 16, 2004 12:04 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Exchange 2k3 & SANs We run E2K on an EMC Symmetrix. Our mailbox load is about 1500 per server. Each server has two fibre links to the SAN, and uses PowerPath to provide load balance/failover. When we first set this up, I explained very carefully to the SAN admin how I wanted it all set up. Separate spindles for each server, and separate spindles for logs and stores. For a variety of reasons, we ended up with more or less random assignments, and our users have been seeing the "Communicating with Exchange Server" box ever since. So, yes, I can tell you absolutely that you will see performance problems if you don't lay out the disks right! Fortunately, we are moving Exchange to a brand spankin' new Clariion with lots of *dedicated* spindles. I'm expecting those pesky "Communicating" boxes go away. Oh, BTW, when you configure your EMC, set it so that it does NOT cache the LUNs containing your log files. This will keep the torrent of log writes from "polluting" your cache with data that will never be read again. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Anthony Sollars Sent: Friday, April 16, 2004 1:00 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Exchange 2k3 & SANs Does anyone on the list have Exchange 2k3/2k running on an EMC SAN or other comparable SAN product. We are getting a lot of push back from the SAN group because we want to design our disk layout for optimum I/O performance and have dedicated spindles for Exchange, and they don't feel it is necessary. Do any of you have any real world experience with the pains of not designing your SAN I/O properly and not following Vendor/MS best practices with disk configuration? Thanks for the input, we are planning on engaging EMC and performing some tests like these in there labs, but would like to get some real world experiences from all of you. Anthony Sollars Sr. Technology Consultant PACCAR Inc _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Web Interface: http://intm-dl.sparklist.com/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=exchange&text_mode=&; lang=english To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. 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