HMC SAN design

We are a hosting company who is planning to implement HMC 4.0 for hosting
Exchange and SharePoint.

Specification requirement:

3000 Exchange users  (MAPI and OWA).
 2000 SharePoint users.

Our design includes one SCC Exchange cluster and one SCC SQL Cluster connected
to our DELL CX3-20 SAN. We have allocated one disk enclosure with 14x300GB 15k
disks.

The big question.  How to use the 14 disks for best performance and storage
allocation. Our suggestion is:

                4 disks - RAID 1+0  for Log files (Exchange + SQL) 
                9 disks – RAID 5 for Database (Exchange + SQL)
                1 disk – hotspare

Other solutions:

One big RAID 5 Array with 13 disks for Databases and logfiles

Or

4 disks - RAID 1+0  for Log files (Exchange + SQL) 
            5 disks – RAID 5 for Database (Exchange)
            4 disks – RAID 5 for Database (SQL)
           1 disk – hotspare

Regards

Chris

As I know a bit about EMC SAN equipment, I can tell you that the first option is
the best one from the RAID performance perspective. RAID 5 on EMC has the best
optimization on 5 or 9 physical drives. There are things to say about separating
Exchange and SQL database, but I will let somebody else speak on the
subject.Now, in the first RAID 10 group I would create multiple LUNs, sizes
20-30GB for Exchange transaction logs. On the second RAID 5 group create same
number of LUNs, size 200GB for Exchange data store. That will give you 1 LUN for
logs and 1 LUN for data per Exchange storage group, so you will have multiple
Exchange storage groups All done in Navisphere. PowerPath would be nice to use
too.

Now you will end up with number of logical drives. Instead of assigning a drive
letter for each, I would map them to the directory.

Hope this helps

Alex

One more suggestion. Maybe have a server with RAID1 (OS) + RAID5 (SQL data) + HS
and SAN for Exchange only

Alex

Hej Alex

 

Thanks for you replay. I will go for the first scenario. Can't find information
about SQL and Exchange on the same array. So I wil go for I, and if we consider
any performance issue, we will move SQL to another array.

 

rg chris