Hardware RAID Configuration

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To increase system availability and help protect against dataloss, the Internet Platform and Operations group used hardware RAIDwith the hardware controllers. The drive performance, type ofserver, and the data type to protect against were considerations indetermining the level of hardware RAID protection needed. Forexample, RAID 1 provides adequate protection for Web Servers butRAID 1+0 is more suited for database storage requiring highperformance and fault tolerance.

The following table lists the hard disk capacity and RAID typeused 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 Directorydirectory 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 systemand 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 "SANConfiguration" section later in this paper.

Information about the different types of RAID types is widelyavailable from resources such as Planning the Layout and RAID Level of Volumes in the Microsoft Windows Server 2003Deployment Kit on Microsoft TechNet.