Moving Exchange 2003 to a SAN
Hi,
We plan to migrate our Exchange servers to 2K3 and install HBA's on the servers to run Exchange off a Hitachi SAN.
We are planning our LUN sizes and array configs but are unsure of the performance benefits of having more disks in the array.
Is it better to have more disks in the array hence there will be more heads to read off? Is this more important than whether the disks are 10k or 15k?
Thanks in advance
Scott
We plan to migrate our Exchange servers to 2K3 and install HBA's on the servers to run Exchange off a Hitachi SAN.
We are planning our LUN sizes and array configs but are unsure of the performance benefits of having more disks in the array.
Is it better to have more disks in the array hence there will be more heads to read off? Is this more important than whether the disks are 10k or 15k?
Thanks in advance
Scott
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Exchange capacity planning guide, basically you count SAN same as you count DAS.
www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/guides/E2k3Perf_ScalGuide/ccec1c70-a3df-404a-93e0-b74077e3d013.mspx?mfr=true
The IOPS per soindle chart at the bottom is for 10K disks, 15K give about 150 IOPS in RAID0 each, 120 IOPS each in RAID 0+1 etc. Disks are so big nowadays that it's rare to need RAID5 so most implimentations are RAID 0+1.
>Is it better to have more disks in the array hence there will be more heads to read off? Is this more important than whether the disks are 10k or 15k?
Answer is very dependant on costs, get price for both 10K and 15K and see which is cheapest for your required IOPS, last big Exchange storage I built used 36 * 72GB 15K disks because they were almost the same price as 72GB 10K disks.
www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/guides/E2k3Perf_ScalGuide/ccec1c70-a3df-404a-93e0-b74077e3d013.mspx?mfr=true
The IOPS per soindle chart at the bottom is for 10K disks, 15K give about 150 IOPS in RAID0 each, 120 IOPS each in RAID 0+1 etc. Disks are so big nowadays that it's rare to need RAID5 so most implimentations are RAID 0+1.
>Is it better to have more disks in the array hence there will be more heads to read off? Is this more important than whether the disks are 10k or 15k?
Answer is very dependant on costs, get price for both 10K and 15K and see which is cheapest for your required IOPS, last big Exchange storage I built used 36 * 72GB 15K disks because they were almost the same price as 72GB 10K disks.
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