I was working the stand on a tradeshow recently when a very nice gentleman stopped by to ask me some performance questions about our RAID cards. This is not an unusual scenario, but this customer’s system was pretty unique and it made me think quite a bit about what different poeple are looking for from a RAID card.

The customer deals with video editing, so performance, performance and performance are important. Did I mention performance? That’s all the customer is interested in. Redundancy didn’t come into his mind (until I pointed out what a pain reinstalling Windows was). Now this customer had spent quite a bit of money. Dual quad-core Xeon processors, 24Gb of RAM, endless video card power, a 5805 Adaptec RAID card and 8 x 300gb WD Velociraptors in a Supermicro hot-swap server chassis. All this for a high end graphics machine was, I thought, pretty crazy stuff. However, the customer was less than impressed with the storage performance of the system.

Investigation showed that the system builder (remaining nameless) had set 2 drives in a mirror for the OS, 2 drives in a RAID 0 for the first data volume, 2 drives in a RAID 0 for the second data volume and 2 drives in a RAID 0 for the third data volume. This config had given the customer the separation of OS from data he was looking for, and the three data volumes he had requested, but it simply stifled the performance of the system, along with wasting a fair amount of space of expensive drives.

After a long discussion with the cusotmer on exactly what his needs were, I gleaned that the OS and software installation was in fact quite a time-consuming operation, and the he really wanted protection for that part of his system, but 300Gb was a waste of space. It also is, in my opinion, not a very fast way of running an OS. As for the data volumes, the customer was just plain interested in speed, speed, and a bit more speed. He did not in any way care if a drive failed and he lost all his data … he wanted to be able to rebuild the system very quickly and copy his data back on from his video sources. So RAID 0 was perfect (never thought I’d hear myself say that).

So we reconfigured his arrays. Starting from scratch we created a RAID 10 over all 8 drives of 100Gb capacity. This was more than sufficient space for OS, software, swapfiles and miscellaneous stuff, and gave much higher performance than the 2 drives in a mirror previously configured. For his data we configured 1 large RAID 0 of all the space that was left on the drives. Creating the unique partitions he required was done at the OS level. End result of the config was that the system appeared to all intents and purposes to be the same as the system he had purchased.

However, now performance absolutely rocked. The customer was gobsmacked at the improvement in speed. Why did it improve so much? Because now every read and write involved (potentially) 8 drive spindles instead of a maximum of 2 at any time in the previous configuration. Yes, there is danger in losing a drive and losing the RAID 0 and its accompanying 3 OS partitions, but the customer realised he could put that back to together in only a few minutes after replacing the drive (with the cold spare he already had).

Result: one very happy customer.

So where’s the point to this ramble? I cringe when I hear RAID 0 … it’s dangerous to data and I would never normally recommend it. But after listening to this customer and questioning him about his needs and reasons, the final system build made perfect sense. Just because it seems a little crazy to me doesn’t mean its crazy, just different to the day-to-day email and blogs I spend my life writing.

I just thought this a good example of how listening to your customer, and focussing on his needs rather than your fears, lead to a happy customer, which is much more important than having a comfortable technical consultant.

Ciao
Neil

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 and is filed under General, Storage Applications, Platforms, Storage Interconnects & RAID, Storage Management, Application Environments, Advisor - Neil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.