David Elfassy IM’d me yesterday and asked me to play a game of word association. I hate word associations. It seems that word associations always lead to people thinking I am insane, and I get locked in padded rooms.
Anyways, he said it would really help him with some Exchange materials that he is working on, so I agreed.
David: SAN optimization. (First word that comes to your mind)
Russ: Banana (I was hungry and was reaching for a banana)
David: You *&(%$__*(&*(@#** – (wow, that was rude) ![:)]()
Russ: Cheerios (what else do you say to that?)
Note: at this point, I could already hear the ambulance and the guys in white suits coming to take me away.
David: SAN optimization.
Russ: diskpar, multipathing (see the link for Rod Fournier’s diskpar blog, and see on the Exchange team blog on the same subject here)
David: SAN availability
Russ: Multipathing, SAN replication, geo clustering
David: Transaction log performance on SAN’s
Russ: disable write back cache for the LUN if possible, provide a separate LUN, RAID 1 within the SAN
Note: David asked me to explain why I did not say anything about RAID 10 or 0+1. I told him that I can’t see throwing that much at a transaction log unless you really have huge amounts of transactions that require scaling up the size of the log space to hold a large size.
David: iSCSI for Exchange
Russ: Interesting solution, not near the I/O achievable via a SAN with multipathing, though. Must use a dedicated gig/e network to achieve best performance.
David: WIndows Storage Server with NAS for small orgs
Russ: Good solution depending on size of org. Again, not near the I/O of an inexpensive SAN device and should again have a dedicated gig/e network for the connection.
