SQL Server 7.0 Implementation

[Ayman Altounji]

I'm going live with an ML370 running NT4.0 SP6 and SOL Server 7.0 SP3 with two RAID cards in the server. The first card has two RAID 1 pairs for SO, tempdb, etc.; second set has 5 drives in RAID 5. (All drives 18G).

What I'm most concerned about is the RAID accelerator. On both cards I'll have it turned off before production, which I know will impact performance. But I'm nervous about the accelerator until I know someone else is using it without problems.

Does anyone have any info to help me address my concerns one way or the other? Your input is appreciated. Thanks!

[Ayman Altounji]

I believe a lot of customers have been using our Array controllers (with the accelerator) with SQL and Oracle for years.

The issues Microsoft has noted with caching RAID cards has typically involved rather "dumb" cards that pretty much just cache and require the OS to do a lot of the actual work. That's not the case with our cards.

[Ayman Altounji]

The Microsoft stance on array controller caches makes an assumption to be on the safe side. You do not want the SQL Server to think that data is written to disk (when it is just written to cache) and then have your server fail. If this occurs, you have lost data. The assumption that Microsoft makes is that the array controller does not contain a battery backed write cache. On Compaq array controllers, if there is no battery backed cache, then there is no write cache available. If there is battery backup on the controller, and the battery fails, the write cache is automatically disabled. Recognizing these facts, enabling the array accelerator seems to be a no brainer.