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Dell POWERVAULT MD1000 User Manual

Page 33

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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