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Archive for March 21st, 2007

Databases, cages and RAID-10, oh my!

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
Posted in Storage Interconnects & RAID, Advisor - Tom Treadway

Question to the Storage Advisors: We’re buying 2 cages that use a PCIe interface and 24 146G 15K drives. We’re going to use RAID 10. Each cage only holds 12 drives. We’ll be using 2 spares in each cage. So that’s a stripe of 5 disk groups. At 175 IOPs that’s approx 875 IOPs across the stripe. If we go higher than 875 IOPs we begin seeing higher queue lengths correct? Both cages are hooked to the same server thru the PCIe controller that supports up to 8Gb/s. This is for an Oracle db, and will host 4 dbs. 2 dbs are IO intensive, 2 are not. Right now we plan on separating the 2 IO intensive dbs to 1 cage each. Would it be better to use both cages per db? I don’t think you can stripe disks across cages(?), so would it be better to create two stripes and put datafiles from both dbs on both cages so that we effectively use 2 stripes of 5 disk groups?