A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ MD1000 SAS SOLUTIONS  VER A00 
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•  RAID 50 – Recommended for those solutions that require a balance between storage 
capacity and performance. This solution provides greater availability and redundancy but 
less storage capacity. 
•  RAID 0 – While not redundant, this solution may be useful for streaming media servers 
that require better performance and are members of a cluster of servers where availability 
and redundancy are handled at a higher level. 
Possible: 
•  RAID 1, RAID 10 – Possible in situations which do not require high storage capacity. In 
general servers utilized for streaming media require large amounts of storage capacity for 
content, especially uncompressed video. 
Not Recommended: 
•  Concatenated – This solution is not recommended due to lack of redundancy and limited 
performance. 
Note: While these configurations are not recommended, they can be configured and utilized. 
Hot Spares 
Hot Spare functionality provides extra security, availability and redundancy by automatically 
replacing a failed physical disk in a RAID group and allowing the rebuild of the degraded array to 
begin immediately. PERC 5/E controllers support Hot Spare functionality and it is recommended 
whenever possible. 
8.  Summary and Conclusions 
It is important to understand the characteristics of each storage component in order to assess the 
performance of the overall application. It is also necessary to understand how the storage 
component is configured since this has a direct impact on the effectiveness of an application. Table 
8-1 summarizes typical storage recommendations for various applications. Recommendations 
listed in the table are general conclusions and the actual storage solution may have additional 
factors which need to be considered before determining an optimal solution. Additional factors 
could include: 
•  Data and power back-up strategies of an Enterprise IT 
•  Storage deployment environment: 
o  Number of active and passive users 
o  Type of data – mission critical or non-mission critical 
•  Storage deployment budget 
•  Long term storage consolidation strategy 
 
 
Table 18: Typical Storage Recommendation for Different Storage Applications 
Application  Storage Recommendations 
Servers  Key Parameters  RAID Level  PowerVault 
MD1000 
Host Controller 
Remarks 
Email 
Availability 
Performance 
Scalability 
RAID 10 provides 
both availability 
and performance 
Daisy-chaining 
provides capacity 
scalability 
For added 
performance enable 
Write back cache 
Recommendation targets 
a typical enterprise e-mail 
Server 
Database 
Availability  RAID 10 provides  Daisy-chaining  For added  Performance