User`s guide

A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ MD1000 SAS SOLUTIONS VER A00
PAGE 33 5/06/2005
• RAID 50 – Recommended for those solutions that require a balance between storage
capacity and performance. This solution provides greater availability and redundancy but
less storage capacity.
• RAID 0 – While not redundant, this solution may be useful for streaming media servers
that require better performance and are members of a cluster of servers where availability
and redundancy are handled at a higher level.
Possible:
• RAID 1, RAID 10 – Possible in situations which do not require high storage capacity. In
general servers utilized for streaming media require large amounts of storage capacity for
content, especially uncompressed video.
Not Recommended:
• Concatenated – This solution is not recommended due to lack of redundancy and limited
performance.
Note: While these configurations are not recommended, they can be configured and utilized.
Hot Spares
Hot Spare functionality provides extra security, availability and redundancy by automatically
replacing a failed physical disk in a RAID group and allowing the rebuild of the degraded array to
begin immediately. PERC 5/E controllers support Hot Spare functionality and it is recommended
whenever possible.
8. Summary and Conclusions
It is important to understand the characteristics of each storage component in order to assess the
performance of the overall application. It is also necessary to understand how the storage
component is configured since this has a direct impact on the effectiveness of an application. Table
8-1 summarizes typical storage recommendations for various applications. Recommendations
listed in the table are general conclusions and the actual storage solution may have additional
factors which need to be considered before determining an optimal solution. Additional factors
could include:
• Data and power back-up strategies of an Enterprise IT
• Storage deployment environment:
o Number of active and passive users
o Type of data – mission critical or non-mission critical
• Storage deployment budget
• Long term storage consolidation strategy
Table 18: Typical Storage Recommendation for Different Storage Applications
Application Storage Recommendations
Servers Key Parameters RAID Level PowerVault
MD1000
Host Controller
Remarks
Email
Availability
Performance
Scalability
RAID 10 provides
both availability
and performance
Daisy-chaining
provides capacity
scalability
For added
performance enable
Write back cache
Recommendation targets
a typical enterprise e-mail
Server
Database
Availability RAID 10 provides Daisy-chaining For added Performance