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August 19th, 2010 12:00
Need help verifying Raid Level
Nearly 3 years ago I built our Production SQL Server on a Dell 2900 with a SAS attached MD3000. The last few months we've been having some performance issues and narrowed it down to the volume on this MD3000. I called support to see if they could assist in determining if we were over saturating the SAS link or if the number of spindles wasn't enough. I answered a few questions and he told me the RAID level was wrong and should be RAID 10 and I need to start there. He then went on to say this was outside the scope of our support contract and they have a division that could help but it would cost.
Anyhow, it seems when I built this nearly 3 years ago I did configure it as RAID 1+0 instead of 0+1. I'm currently logged into the Modular Disk Storage Manager Client and under Tools==>View Storage Array Profile==>Virtual Disks tab, shows the RAID Level at 1.
If I go to the Disk Groups tab I see the output below. The bottom section of this output leads me to believe we're RAID 1+0, each drive is mirrored.
DISK GROUPS------------------------------
Number of virtual disk groups: 1
DISK GROUP 1 (RAID 1)
Disk group status: Online
Physical Disk type: Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)
Enclosure loss protection: No
Current owner: RAID Controller Module in slot 0
Associated virtual disks and free capacities:
VIRTUAL DISK NAME CAPACITY
1 953.627 GB
Associated physical disks (in piece order):
ENCLOSURE SLOT
0 0 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 7]
0 1 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 8]
0 2 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 9]
0 3 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 10]
0 4 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 11]
0 5 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 12]
0 6 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 13]
0 7 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 0]
0 8 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 1]
0 9 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 2]
0 10 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 3]
0 11 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 4]
0 12 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 5]
0 13 [mirrored pair with physical disk at enclosure 0, slot 6]
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Dev Mgr
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August 19th, 2010 13:00
The MD3000 only supports raid 1/0, not 0/1. Effectively they spread the data out across drives in the same way, but there's a difference in how the controller manages/monitors it.
Assuming you indeed have the MD3000 (not the MD3000i), it's hard for a single server to fill the SAS connection bandwidth (~1.2GByte/s (not Gbit/s)).
If you haven't yet, check out this link; http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/MD3000i%20Performance%20Monitoring. It gives you info about how to monitor performance on an MD3000/MD3000i.