Release Note

Cisco Unified ICM/Contact Center Enterprise & Hosted Editions, Release 7.5,

Hardware and System Software Specification

• Multiple external storage enclosures are desirable (when needed) for increased performance and fault tolerance.

• External storage enclosures with dedicated RAID controllers are supported with MCS server systems.

Supported configurations:

• Fibre Channel is supported only in a point-to-point topology deployment.

• Dedicated on-board or add-in RAID controllers are required to use any of the RAID levels supported.

• RAID 1 (Mirroring and Duplexing) – This is the minimum RAID level for all critical Unified ICM and Unified

Contact Center components. See

Appendix B – RAID Configuration Requirements for details. Mirroring is

typically used for boot drives on all servers to prevent loss of data and down time in the event of a disk failure.

• RAID 10 (A Stripe of Mirrors) – This is the required RAID level for all medium to large Unified ICM/Contact

Center Logger and HDS nodes. RAID 10 offers the highest performance needed to meet the demands of SQL

Server and the Logger or HDS, while still maintaining a safe level of redundancy.

Unsupported configurations:

• Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC - AL) fabric topology

• Software-based RAID provided by the operating system or other software

• Proprietary RAID solutions

• RAID 5 (Block Interleaved Distributed Parity)

• RAID 0 (Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance)

• RAID 0+1 (A Mirror of Stripes)

Caution

Typically used for redundancy in file server applications, RAID 5 has been observed in product testing to manifest

considerable performance degradation in write-intensive applications. Therefore, RAID 5 is not supported for new

deployments. When “technology refresh” upgrading, configure the target server array (that which is replacing the

existing RAID 5 array) for RAID 10.

RAID 0 is not supported due to the lack of fault tolerance. If one drive fails, then all data in the array is lost. RAID

0+1 is not supported due to increased risks of data loss or down time in the event of a failure.

• Network Attached Storage (NAS)

NAS solutions pose unacceptable risk due to the variability of the interface between the server and the NAS device;

specifically, latency and bandwidth of the network link can introduce performance delays that put the solution at

risk. Because of this variability, Cisco cannot support NAS for Unified ICM or Unified Contact Center.

Alternative storage option:

Unified ICM and Unified CC server components are qualified and tuned for optimal operation on a dedicated storage

solution – direct attached (internal/external) SCSI or SAS. However, recognizing that some deployments have data

retention needs that exceed the storage capabilities of direct attached disk arrays, Cisco is prepared to endorse the

use of a Storage Area Network (SAN) under the following conditions:

1. The SAN must be dedicated to Unified ICM/CC only; the SAN might not be shared with other applications.

2. The SAN must be used for historical databases (HDS) only.