MSA 20/SATA drives used for Windows 2003/Exchange Cluster

[Steve Errotabere]

I have a customer who is buying a MSA150cs/MSA20 with 10 250G SATA drives. It has come to my attention that SATA drives are being used for a production Exchange and File Server environment. I heard that SATA drives are for recommended for reference data, backup, or not often used data. Since Exchange will be heavily I/O intensive with reads and writes, are we going to be in a issue here and is this a supported configuration?

[Ruslan]

Hi Steve! It depend on number mailboxes and the size of store. For exchange environment the high I/O capability will be need for transaction logs and message queue. Data files can be placed on slow speed drives. In your sitiation I advise you to make one array with 10 disk drives + 2 hot spare. Make logical volume with raid 1 level for T-logs, Message queue, Quorum; raid 5 LD for data (Information Store).

[Steve Errotabere]

"It depend on number mailboxes and the size of store"

The data I have right now is approx 2000 mailboxes on a 2 node A/P cluster, I do not have a store size. My concern is how much I/0 is a possibility burning out the drives and having performance issues down the road.

Thanks for the info

-Steve

[Vincent Fleming · Accepted solution]

With 2000 mailboxes, I would definately NOT suggest SATA for disk.

The duty cycle on the SATA drives is 50% - you're only supposed to run them 50% of the time. Running them 100% significantly reduces their MTBF, which means you will experience an unacceptable drive failure rate.

I would suggest that you use approximately 24 73GB/10k drives in Hardware RAID 1 (that should produce both enough data space and performance for about 2000 mailboxes at about 200MB each) for the dataspaces.

For Hardware RAID1 in a cluster, I would suggest an MSA1000 or an EVA4000. Use the SCSI drives for the MSA and FC drives for EVA.

Add also some more RAID1 for logs - be sure to use a seperate set of drives for the logs. 6 to 8 drives should be sufficient.

Regards,

Vince

[Vincent Fleming]

PS: I noticed that you're new around here...

Assigning points is the way you let people know that your appreciate their time, and also to let people know which answers were particularly helpful.

You can get to your answers with unassigned points by going here: http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/pageList.do?userId=CA637051&listType=question&forumId=1

You can go here for some tips:
http://66.34.90.71/ITRCForumsEtiquette/


Regards,
Vince