Re: Large Number of Storage Groups

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

On Thu, 30 Aug 2007 06:00:31 -0400, "Mike Abbaticchio"
<nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

My current layout is Exchange 2003 with 2 SG's / 8Db's all on the same same
RAID 10 LUNs, with spearate RAID 1 LUNs for xlogs. I went through all the
IOP calculations with EMC and have acceptable performance, but the read
times on the DB drive were never as good as I expected. Needless to say, I
am being real careful with the 2007 plan.

Thanks for your response.... I was just wondering if there was a way out of
the drive letter limitations. I will more than likely end up using less
storage groups and end up with larger db sizes as a compromise.

Mike Abbaticchio

I'm never convinced what RAID10 gets you on platforms like EMC. Are
you expecting drives to fail that often? The performance gains are
neligible. Far better would be to go RAID6 and spread out on all those
suddenly available spindles.
Like the other posted says, Mount points are the way to go in terms of
eliminating the drive letter challenge. You've no choice later in 2007
if you fill the full 50 stores anyway :-)

Your configuration is not in line with 2003 best practice though (I
assume you are on W2K3?). The "fill a storage group with stores and
then make another storage group" thing was correct in 2000 (on 2000 or
2003) but not in 2003 on 2003. You are affecting your log disk write
performance and potentially hitting buffer problems.

First job for me would be to make two more SGs and spread all the
users across them. Then I'd look at how my logs were performing. Then
I'd have a think about the read cache on the EMC (whatcha got? DMX,
Clariion, Celera?)

.

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