Best practices for large storage device
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ssilcox
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Best practices for large storage device
Storage, Storage strategy, Storage management
My company just bought a two large attached storage devices for disk based backup (each device has 14 x 300 gb). Each device has two controllers, and I have two dual channel SCSI HBA's that I can connect them to. Before setting this up, I wanted to check with all of you pro's out there for best practices regarding these array's.

The only use is going to be disk based backup. There will be around 12 servers backed up to this device.

Current setup is using a split bus for each device and running both controllers to each channel on the HBA's (which gives me four logical disks running RAID 5). Is it best to have one large volume striping those four logical disks, or creat a volume on each logical disk? From a management point of view - one, large volume would be much easier to manage the backups on.

Your input is most appreciated!
ASKED: Oct 26 2005  1:40 PM GMT
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klewis
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From a performance standpoint, logical striping across four LUNs will give very good performance for your backups. In the event of a disk failure on one of the RAID sets, you will see some performance degradation - just how much depends on how long it takes the array to rebuild, I/O load, etc.

As along as your software supports volumes of that size, you might as well stripe across the lot of them. By my math, if you're doing a total of four RAID5 sets with no hotspare, each RAID set is almost 1.8TB or ovre 7TB for the lot. Be sure your OS supports a logical disk of that size, before you stripe them.

Good luck!
Last Answered: Oct 27 2005  12:08 AM GMT by klewis   0 pts.
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poppaman2   0 pts.  |   Oct 27 2005  1:13PM GMT

If your OS supports volumes of the resultant size (about 7,200 GB or 7.2TB raw capacity, based upon four 7disk RAID 5 sets) AND you require the speed inherent in such a setup, a RAID 5,0 (or 0,5) setup such as you describe will work well.

If you do not require the speed from the setup aboove, consider utilizing 4 ea RAID 5 volumes, or if your controllers support 14 devices instead of 7, TWO RAID 5 vilumes.

If your controllers allow, and the additional lost capacity is not required, consider RAID 6 (two parity disks…)

 
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