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Optimal Disks and Configuration for "SAS Work" space on a new W2K3 x64 SAS server
I am building a new W2K3 x64 server to support SAS 9.2 64 bit edition via Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 as a Published Application, and have a question about optimal configuration for the SAS Work area. This is an HP DL380 G5 with 16 Gb RAM. For the most part the SAS workload can be characterized as predominately large sequential IO requests with high volumes of data.
Here are the separate drive arrays I currently have envisioned:
1) OS will be 2 mirrored 72 Gb 15K SAS disks
2) Windows Pagefile will be a separate 36 gb 15K SAS disk
3) SAS User Data Storage will be 200 Gb RAID5 array on iSCSI SAN
4) "SAS Work" is temporary processing space used by the application typically for large sequential IO, and will be local 15K SAS disks on the server. Thinking I need about 100 Gb of shared space for all users.
Here are options I've considered for this "SAS Work" temporary space:
a) 1 x 146 Gb SAS drive at 15K (RAID0, no redundancy, if it fails I'd need to replace immediately to get server up again, but I think this would be OK in our situation of having just a few heavy users).
b) 2 x 146 Gb SAS drives at 15K (RAID1 mirror). No real down side other than the added cost.
c) 4 x 36 Gb SAS drives at 15K (RAID5). Might my performance with these 4 smaller disks actually be better, even though they have the parity overhead of RAID5?
Does anyone have guidance on how to configure the disks to support this "SAS Work" in terms of picking the size, speed, number of disks, and RAID levels? I have looked at each of the articles below, but still asking this question!
Best Practices for Configuring your I/O Subsystem for SAS®9 Applications
http://support.sas.com/rnd/papers/sgf07/sgf2007-iosubsystem.pdf
ETL Performance Tuning Tips
http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/ETLperformance07.pdf
How to Maintain Happy SAS®9 Users IT focused
http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings09/310-2009.pdf
Here are the separate drive arrays I currently have envisioned:
1) OS will be 2 mirrored 72 Gb 15K SAS disks
2) Windows Pagefile will be a separate 36 gb 15K SAS disk
3) SAS User Data Storage will be 200 Gb RAID5 array on iSCSI SAN
4) "SAS Work" is temporary processing space used by the application typically for large sequential IO, and will be local 15K SAS disks on the server. Thinking I need about 100 Gb of shared space for all users.
Here are options I've considered for this "SAS Work" temporary space:
a) 1 x 146 Gb SAS drive at 15K (RAID0, no redundancy, if it fails I'd need to replace immediately to get server up again, but I think this would be OK in our situation of having just a few heavy users).
b) 2 x 146 Gb SAS drives at 15K (RAID1 mirror). No real down side other than the added cost.
c) 4 x 36 Gb SAS drives at 15K (RAID5). Might my performance with these 4 smaller disks actually be better, even though they have the parity overhead of RAID5?
Does anyone have guidance on how to configure the disks to support this "SAS Work" in terms of picking the size, speed, number of disks, and RAID levels? I have looked at each of the articles below, but still asking this question!
Best Practices for Configuring your I/O Subsystem for SAS®9 Applications
http://support.sas.com/rnd/papers/sgf07/sgf2007-iosubsystem.pdf
ETL Performance Tuning Tips
http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/ETLperformance07.pdf
How to Maintain Happy SAS®9 Users IT focused
http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings09/310-2009.pdf
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