Re: Exchange Disks

I just finished going through an upgrade of our email server and here's what
I did for 75 users:

Bought a Dual Xeon 3.2ghz/3GB HP ML370 server with a smart array 642 raid
controller
Got 8 10k 72gb SCSI hard drives:
2 RAID 1 for logs (68gb)
2 RAID 1 for OS (Windows server 2003 standard) (68gb)
4 RAID 5 for the Data store (200+ gb)
Upgraded to Exchange 2003 enterprise (From 2000 std)

Everything runs great!

This is what I replaced that ran for 5 years, longest up time was 593 days:
AMD 300mhz, standard motherboard, 256mb ram, 1 10k 72GB SCSI disk (store), 1
18gb drive(os), Win 2k server/Exchange 2k standard.

Not sure what Sata would do in a server enviroment, but if I can run
Exchange for 5 years without a raid array, I'm sure it will be fine.

Tyson

"Steve" <Steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:D84B3C3E-E6F5-489F-B232-64745CECDD82@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thanks John,

I was looking at using a cheaper alternative with 7,200 RPM Server SATA
drives. Dell do these for servers.

How does that affect things?

Thanks,
Steve.

"John Fullbright [MVP]" wrote:

I think it was Paul that asked a very similar question recently. At the
200 user end of the range, you're talking 200 to 400 IOPS. Given this and
assuming 15K FCP dirves:

OS raid 1 mirror
Logs raid 1 mirror
Databases raid 10 (4 disk)

If you're going to make tradeoffs to reduce spindle count, you coukd
consider single drives for the OS and or Logs instead of mirrors.
Another
option would be a local mirror and iSCSI attached SAN disks for the
additional LUNs. The IO targets for the drives are :

Logs: 50 IOPS
Database: 400 IOPS

RAID 5 is explicitly excluded because it requires even more spindles to
reach the same performance level. Assuming a 1:1 read:write ratio, a 4
drive RAID 5 array of 15K scsi drives will providew the following:

read performance: 390
write performance: 97.5
mixed performance 243.75


A RAID 10 array consisting of 5 15K FCP spindles performs as follows:

read performance: 520
write performance: 260
mixed performance: 390


That's 60% better performance for RAID 10 in the same number of spindles.
To reach the same level of performance as our 4 drive RAID 10 array, RAID
5
would require 6 spindles (a 50% increase in spindle count)

John



"Mark Arnold [MVP]" <mark@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:moe1q2tbbj4tg1jsjf62um4tteljmjnovf@xxxxxxxxxx
On Sun, 7 Jan 2007 00:06:00 -0800, Steve
<Steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi there,

Is there some sort of rule-of-thumb for setting up disks based on a
number
of users? I've seen all sorts of calculators but they seem to be aimed
at
1000+ users. I saw another post that said if you have 5 users you can
just
install everything on C: Is there some sort of simple recommendation if
you
have 100-200 users?

Thanks in advance.
Steve.

No, there isn't anything like that. There are far too many variables.
Are you using SATA, SAS, SCSI disks, are you connected via Fibre
Channel, are you using a cache in front of the disks, are the disks
7,200, 10,000, 15,000 rpm. It just goes on and on.

Other people might like to post endless links on how those disks
should be set up and the IT Showcase on how Microsoft do their
Exchange 2007 servers from which you might be able to glean some
information. That information would be useless to you given the vast
gulf between the published numbers and yours.

As a suggested configuration for you I would use two disks in RAID1
for the OS and binaries, the same again for the transaction logs and
then either the same again or a small RAID5 for the stores. What
server? Well, the ProLiant ML370 is the right box to work around, be
it from HP or the equivalent from the other server vendors.





.

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