On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 07:31:15 -0600, Patrick Scribner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > We are designing a new architecture for Exchange 2003(upgrade from 2000 > but changing philosophies quite a bit) Currently all users download > mail to a .pst file but we are changing this so everything stays on the > server and gets groomed every 6months. We have specked out the > following users: [snip]
First off, I'd suggest going with HP Proliants rather than Dell Poweredges, I've had a lot of bad experiences with poweredges, and I've had long reliable use of proliants. Secondly, you might consider splitting this into 2 servers, depending on how many concurrent conenctions you will have and what kind of clients they'll be using. If all 2700+ will be on at the same time with Outlook then you might run into performance problems, and of course if you do go with 2 servers you won't have a total mail outage if 1 server goes down. As for RAID configuration, we moved 2000 users off of our SAN attached exchange server to direct attached server that had 2 drives configured as RAID 1+0 per database (I know, everything I've heard about RAID 1+0 says it needs 4 drives, but HP has done some funky stuff so it works with 2) using 72 gig drives, and even on the largest database RAID the disk I/O latency is almost nonexistant (I use the Physical Disk | Avg. Disk sec/Read, Write, & Transfer perfmon counters to guage I/O latency). The reason we moved off the SAN isn't because exchange + SAN's are bad, it's because SAN engineers who have no clue about exchange shouldn't design the RAID groups to be used. We had 5 databases on 4 very large disks in a RAID 5 group, I/O latency was horrible on it, which caused all kinds of outlook performance problems. _________________________________________________________________ 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 send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. Attn: Discussion List Management 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Please include the email address which you have been contacted with.
