EV Disk Configuration ?

[JonD]

Hi
      Am building a Windows 2008 Enterprise Vault 8.0 environment and am looking for information or feedback on disk configuration.  Specifically, what stripe size and allocation block are recommended for Enterprise vault indices and data partitions.  Right now am considering:

                                    INDEX:  8 KB Block, 256KB Stripe
                                    DATA:    4 MB Block, 4 MB Stripe

            I know i need larger blocks for quicker backups but would like feedback on this configuration.  Am concerned about file sizes being deposited but have had some difficulty in locating this information.  Any input ?

Regards,
          Jon D.

[Liam_Finn1]

Jon,

I think the settings you have are OK. There is little need to change them other than for backup speed. What I would think of more than the data block sizes is the raid you will be housing your data on and the number of disks that will be dedicated to each LIN.

I highly recommend Raid 10 for both indexes and data because it provides the best redundancy and also provides the faster seek time. Also calculate the IOPS you will need. On average a 15K disk can give you 180 IOPS so using that calculate the number of Read and Write IOPS you need and adjust the number of spindles to meet your systems IOPS demand or you could be running into more pain other than your backup speed. As you know in a RAID 10 you get double the read IOPS than you do write so for searching of the archive and restoring data from the archive RAID 10 is the best solution

[JonD]

Yes, unfortunately I am stuck with RAID 5 for the indexes and RAID 10 for the data partition.  I will be squeezing all the IO I can but the only variables I have to work with are block and stripe size.  Any idea what the average write for an archived exchange item to the index is ??  Thanks.  Ever seen any symantec documentation on this ?  Appreciate the helpful feedback Scanner001.

Regards,
       Jon D.

[Liam_Finn1]

I have never seen any documentation on the average write for an archive message but from experience i have been burned once and now offer 3000 IOPS write and 5000 IOPS read for my indexes as our indexes are regulary searched as we use Discovery Accelerator.

We also do journaling and this does not put much of a load on the disk IO on average we hot 200 IOPS for the journaling task write to index

Our FAS does put a heavier index write averaging around 2000 IOPS when FSA is in full swing at night

The largest IOPS we see is during backups. We do hit the 5000 mark when we are backing up our indexes and our SQL but thats to be expected and it also happens during off hours so little to no effect on the end users

[JonD]

Thats some great information thank you Scanner.

Jon

[JonD]

Liam
      Was wondering how many users that was composed of per Vault server.  Have to ask what tool was used to get these numbers.  Have to ask as our project is stalled and we need to create a baseline for storage estimates out of the ether - far from ideal...  Thanks for all your help.

Regards,
         Jon D.

[Liam_Finn1]

 Jon,

We have 3000 users on the one server. We used normal Windoes counters to get the number of IOPS. We also compaired these against the EMC Powerpath and Qlogic SANSurfer to validate our IOPS

[JonD]

Liam

  Very helpful, thanks.

Jon D.

[Liam_Finn1]

 Dont forget if you find your solution Vote on it and also mark it as solved