Hardware RAID Configuration for Data Storage (Windows SharePoint Services 2.0)
To increase system availability and help protect against data loss, the Internet Platform and Operations group used hardware RAID with the hardware controllers. The drive performance, type of server, and the data type to protect against were considerations in determining the level of hardware RAID protection needed. For example, RAID 1 provides adequate protection for Web Servers but RAID 1+0 is more suited for database storage requiring high performance and fault tolerance.
The following table lists the hard disk capacity and RAID type used by different servers in this configuration.
Table 2 – Server farm hard disks
| Servers | Hard Disks | RAID Type |
|---|---|---|
Front-end Web servers |
Two 18.2-GB mirrored hard disk drives |
RAID 1 |
Servers running Microsoft Active Directory directory service |
Three 18.2-GB logical drives for operating system, database, and logs |
RAID 1+0 |
Servers running SQL Server |
Two 18.2 GB hard disk drive |
RAID 1+0 |
Storage area network (SAN) unit* |
34 36-GB hard disk drives |
RAID 5 for data backups RAID 1+0 for SQL Server database files RAID 1 for Quorum drive |
Backup server |
Two 18.2-GB hard disk drives for operating system and software Four 18.2-GB hard disk drives for additional backups |
RAID 1+0 for operating system and software RAID 5 for backups |
*For details about the drives in the SAN, see the "SAN Configuration" section later in this paper.
Information about the different types of RAID types is widely available from resources such as Planning the Layout and RAID Level of Volumes (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=104585\&clcid=0x409) in the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Deployment Kit on Microsoft TechNet.