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Answered Disc Setup

  • Thursday, May 31, 2012 6:02 AM
     
     
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    I know the more spindles you have the better, but when you are on tight budget things change a bit. 

    Running 4 VM' s with the following roles independent (Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, File Server, MS Great Plains and MS Business Portal - 30 Users) will the following configuration options be enough. I know all depends on the load etc, but just for indication :

    RAID 10 with the following setup :

    4 X SAS Drives 15000 rpm

    and

    8 X Nearline SAS 7200 rpm


     

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  • Thursday, May 31, 2012 6:59 AM
     
     
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    I know the more spindles you have the better, but when you are on tight budget things change a bit. 

    Running 4 VM' s with the following roles independent (Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, File Server, MS Great Plains and MS Business Portal - 30 Users) will the following configuration options be enough. I know all depends on the load etc, but just for indication :

    RAID 10 with the following setup :

    4 X SAS Drives 15000 rpm

    and

    8 X Nearline SAS 7200 rpm


    In a listed environment 7200 rpm drives will run out of IOPS long before they will run out of capacity. You can store on them only "ice cold" data.

    -nismo

     
  • Thursday, May 31, 2012 7:20 AM
     
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    You are going to be fine with that configuration; you can put services that consume less resources (AD) on those 7200 drives and Exchange and SQL on the SAS drives. And for 30 users is not going to be a big load on servers.

    Adrian Costea - MCP, MCTS, MCSA 2003, MCITP: Windows 7

    My Blog: www.vkernel.ro/blog

     
  • Friday, June 01, 2012 3:48 AM
     
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    Hello,

    That seems like a strong disk configuration for a small company.  Its certainly possible that your applications could be heavier than you'd expect, but I think that is a good start.  You can isolate the high IO operations like Exchange and GP on the SAS drives.  You can put file services, etc. on the slower drives.

    Nathan Lasnoski

    http://blog.concurrency.com/author/nlasnoski/

     
  • Friday, June 01, 2012 6:22 AM
     
     
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    I might go with just the 4 X SAS Drives rather then the SATA Drives?
     
  • Friday, June 01, 2012 7:15 AM
     
     
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    If you already have the hardware, use it, but yes you can use just the SAS drives since you have such a small number of users, and if the load gets higher put the 7200 drives in use.

    Adrian Costea - MCP, MCTS, MCSA 2003, MCITP: Windows 7

    My Blog: www.vkernel.ro/blog

     
  • Friday, June 01, 2012 9:26 AM
     
     
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    I might go with just the 4 X SAS Drives rather then the SATA Drives?

    You may go all-SLC flash if you have money to waste :) But it makes little to zero sense... Do "home brewed" tiering manually separating I/O intensive data from a file dump. Big capacity SATA is good for storing near archive grade data (cold) and I/O intensive stuff like database logs (hot) should be kept on smaller capacity but more IOPS capable gear. SAS with SSD caching (software, hardware or mix, look @ CacheCade and Fusion-IO products here).

    -nismo

     
  • Monday, June 04, 2012 7:43 AM
     
     
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    Don't have the hardware yet. Looking at my options. The 1TB Nearline SAS 7200RPM looks more then a option for me...data wise although my current VMs using 600GB. Will the 1TB Nearline SAS 7200RPM running in Raid 10 be able to keep up?
     
  • Monday, June 04, 2012 1:57 PM
     
     
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    Don't have the hardware yet. Looking at my options. The 1TB Nearline SAS 7200RPM looks more then a option for me...data wise although my current VMs using 600GB. Will the 1TB Nearline SAS 7200RPM running in Raid 10 be able to keep up?

    Do you have production system now to trace your load and calculate required IOPS?

    -nismo

     
  • Monday, June 04, 2012 2:25 PM
     
     
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    I'd say that the performance capabilities of SAS will be a benefit to you.  The last thing you'd want is disk IO issues and the cost different should be relatively minor.  That said, having additional SATA drives will be useful for backup and storage.

    Nathan Lasnoski

    http://blog.concurrency.com/author/nlasnoski/

     
  • Monday, June 04, 2012 8:14 PM
     
     
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    I'd say that the performance capabilities of SAS will be a benefit to you.  The last thing you'd want is disk IO issues and the cost different should be relatively minor.  That said, having additional SATA drives will be useful for backup and storage.

    Nathan Lasnoski

    http://blog.concurrency.com/author/nlasnoski/

    Interface itself does not matter much. Yes, SAS drives have deeper I/O queues (good for elevator sorting) and proper hardware logical block size (no need to read the whole pseudo-stripe to check ECC) but more comes from mechanic (rpm) then anything else. Give a try to this:

    http://blogs.hds.com/claus/2011/09/putting-hdd-product-trends-into-perspective-a-subsystem-view.html

    Hope this helped :)

    -nismo