Exchange Advice / Question 1

[nsanto17]

As of right now we have our email outsourced and our users are using POP to get their email. We have just started looking into Exchange. Here is my senerio

120 users @ about 5 GIG per user = 600 Gig for the mail store

My dell rep is trying to sell me the PowerVault MD3000i with 5 /1TB drives in it. I think it expands to 15 drives for a total of 15TB. Do I need the MD3000i or is it recomended since my mail store would be so big?

Any advice would be great...

Thank

 

[58sniper]

Uh - no. 600GB is NOT what you need for the mail store.

You haven't provided anywhere near enough info to properly size, but..

Assuming 14 days for DIRT, and no extra IOPS load such as from Blackberry, Enterprise Vault, Unity, etc, and staying with best practices:

7 LUNS @ 137GB each for the databases
7 LUNS @ 8GB each for transaction logs
1 LUN @ 138GB for recovery storage group

Using RAID 5 for the DBs, you'd need 10*146GB*10k SAS spindles. Using RAID 1/0 for the logs, you'd need 2*146*10k SAS. Using RAID 5 for RSG, you'd need 5*500GB*7.2k SATA. That's 12 disks. And that's a single server solution - no SCC/SCR/CCR/LCR.

You NEVER plan based on capacity. You plan based on performance. When you do that, capacity is not an issue.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[nsanto17]

what does 7 LUNS mean?

 

[Cstorms]

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid5_gci1259856,00.html

Check that out for a description of a LUN

Cory

 

[nsanto17]

I will start a new thread for a recomended setup. I will provide as much info as i can.

Thanks

 

[Zelandakh]

I think there is a typo on the logs and it should be 20 disks not 2. Other than that, I concur with my learned friend...