asked
Raid Configuration
Hello Currently we have SQL running on a single Raid 1. The Items on this raid are. 1. OS 2. Logfile 3. Data File 4. Tempory Backup 5. Copies of Printed Documents (1GB, 53,000 Files) 6. Document Templates for Printing (250MB, 1,500 Files) 7. Images of the Products (120MB, 900 Files) 8. Copies of Emailed Documents (330MB, 17,000 Files) How many Raid's should we have? What Raid? What should go on each Raid? Should we move the location of any of the above to another network location? (Our Read and Write I/O is about Equal) Thanks
Personally (this is just my opinion, many ways to do this), I would, at minimum, separate the OS, data and log files on different arrays. Not just disk slices, but separate sets of disk spindles ( physical disks). If the other files are convenient wfere they are and are not extremely hard-hit, they could go on a single array. The idea here is to improve performance by separating the IO from the OS, data file and log file, making them independent from one another. Simultaneous IO can happen without any contention from any other RW operation. Oh, and I have always found RAID 10 to be about the best for SQL performance. For a little extra boost, you would also isolate tempdb in this same manner. HTH
Just to add to @KenAWatson (+1).. We also have a different arrays for OS Pagefile and Backups. Can be overkill, but if you have capacity then why not... Also You need to determin what your "high" operations are and then benchmark each array with tools like SQLIO (Brent Ozar has a good [video][1] to demo this). [1]:
http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2008/11/storage-performance-testing-with-sqlio/
