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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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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.

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