April 4, 2012 at 10:58 am
Ok, so this is a question asking for experience and some limited opinion. I know there are "preferences" but I would prefer to know what actual results you have seen.
So I have Dell PE r710 with 6 300GB 15K RPM drives and dual quad core procs plus 8 GB of RAM and a PERC700 card w/512MB cache. I run Microsoft Dynamics GP and have a 16 GB database. That is the new hardware I am building the new box with 2008 R2. I historically have heard to Mirror the OS, Mirror Transaction logs and R5 or better the database. Plus, keep them on different spindles. Well, I have 6 disks. So to mirror the OS, and keep logs and db separate from each other and from the OS, I am forced to 3 mirrors. I couldn't justify the 8 drive config with same specs because those smalller sized drives with same / similar capacities cost twice as much and would raised my purchase cost well beyond budget and not what I think performance gains would be. So I am left with the following options
1. Mirror OS, Mirror SQLApp+DB, Mirror Logs
2. Mirror OS, R5 Stripe 4 remaining drives and do logicals on top of physical to separate out the App Install, DB, Logs
3. R5 stripe all 6 disks Perc Level then logically part out for OS, App Install, DB, Logs
4. Mirrors 3 sets of disks with R0 OR R5 Stripe across them at Perc level and Partition logically for OS, App, DB, Logs.
The basic concern is of course only the option that remains on separate spindles for OS, DB, and Logs (with SQL app install doubling on either the DB or Log disks or I guess OS disks would be an option as well) is option #1. Anyway, Would love to hear what you all think. I could stress test every option and compare results but time becomes the issue there. Thoughts?
April 4, 2012 at 11:32 am
Why does the App need something other than just the OS disk? Is it reading & writing files?
The probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival.
April 4, 2012 at 11:52 am
I used to administer GP at my previous company. How many users do you have on GP and how many use it concurrently? Most cases, GP does not need to be mirrored at all... Simply have a good backup strategy for the databases and you are fine.
Jared
CE - Microsoft
April 4, 2012 at 11:55 am
RAID 0+1 will yield a 900 GB disk and offer the greatest performance. (if the PERC700 supports it)
April 4, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Yeah, but may not be necessary for GP. Again, if you only have 2 or 3 people accessing it you will not have a large load. So, in that case you are not optimizing for performance. You are optimizing for DR. Or maybe even optimizing for space. We had an offsite backup and GP was not critical. So we had a RAID 0 to maximize space and if something happened they were prepared to wait. That was the business choice. So, the questions have to be... How many people are accessing it at any 1 time, and how important is it to the business? If a small amount of users... Don't worry about splitting database files and transaction logs on different raid set-ups and stuff. You're not going to see any improvement there. If you have Several users constantly running reports and importing GLs and printing checks... Then you can start to worry about it. However, GP is designed for medium sized businesses and most companies have 1 or 2 people using it daily.
Jared
CE - Microsoft
April 4, 2012 at 12:16 pm
SQLKnowItAll (4/4/2012)
I used to administer GP at my previous company. How many users do you have on GP and how many use it concurrently? Most cases, GP does not need to be mirrored at all... Simply have a good backup strategy for the databases and you are fine.
I think I would go with RAID 10 (or is it 1 + 0). I'd rather mirror the drives first then strip across that. More resilient to multiple drive failures.
April 4, 2012 at 12:17 pm
RAID 0+1 is still the best choice, regardless of anything else.
You would need 20 years of finacial data for 10,000 customers before you even got close to using half of a 900GB disk.
i have 4 GP backends here. most are 100 GB or less. but they get hammered from 9 to 5, M-F.
performance needs to be considered. GP is a piece of crap.
April 4, 2012 at 12:21 pm
Geoff A (4/4/2012)
RAID 0+1 is still the best choice, regardless of anything else.You would need 20 years of finacial data for 10,000 customers before you even got close to using half of a 900GB disk.
i have 4 GP backends here. most are 100 GB or less. but they get hammered from 9 to 5, M-F.
performance needs to be considered. GP is a piece of crap.
I'll agree with the piece of crap, and that 900gb is plenty, AND that performance ha to be considered if it is getting hammered daily. My experience has been 1 or 2 people using it intermittently throughout the day. Some days, not at all. Just depended on how many payables went out and how many receivables came in. All of our payroll was through a GL import, so not much going on... 🙂
EDIT: Trans Log can become quit large when importing large amounts of data using GP's import. At month end we would import almost 200,000 rows of data. That's right, the chart of accounts was almost 200,000. Might even be that or more now.
Jared
CE - Microsoft
April 4, 2012 at 12:28 pm
Lynn Pettis (4/4/2012)
I think I would go with RAID 10 (or is it 1 + 0). I'd rather mirror the drives first then strip across that. More resilient to multiple drive failures.
yes, if the PERC700 supports it....
performance will be identical to 0+1 except rebuilds will be faster on a 1+0 RAID.
April 4, 2012 at 12:31 pm
Here is a comparison of Raid 1 + 0 vs Raid 0 + 1, http://decipherinfosys.wordpress.com/2008/01/15/difference-between-raid-01-vs-raid-10/%5B/url.
Given a choice for resiliency, I'll go with Raid 1 + 0.
April 4, 2012 at 12:48 pm
SQLKnowItAll (4/4/2012)
Geoff A (4/4/2012)
RAID 0+1 is still the best choice, regardless of anything else.You would need 20 years of finacial data for 10,000 customers before you even got close to using half of a 900GB disk.
i have 4 GP backends here. most are 100 GB or less. but they get hammered from 9 to 5, M-F.
performance needs to be considered. GP is a piece of crap.
I'll agree with the piece of crap, and that 900gb is plenty, AND that performance ha to be considered if it is getting hammered daily. My experience has been 1 or 2 people using it intermittently throughout the day. Some days, not at all. Just depended on how many payables went out and how many receivables came in. All of our payroll was through a GL import, so not much going on... 🙂
EDIT: Trans Log can become quit large when importing large amounts of data using GP's import. At month end we would import almost 200,000 rows of data. That's right, the chart of accounts was almost 200,000. Might even be that or more now.
lol, we should start a thead about the HORROR's of GP!!! 😛
it is an absolute joke the way Microsoft makes use of its own technology.
i have a GL3000 table with 20 Million records in it!
April 4, 2012 at 12:51 pm
Geoff A (4/4/2012)
SQLKnowItAll (4/4/2012)
Geoff A (4/4/2012)
RAID 0+1 is still the best choice, regardless of anything else.You would need 20 years of finacial data for 10,000 customers before you even got close to using half of a 900GB disk.
i have 4 GP backends here. most are 100 GB or less. but they get hammered from 9 to 5, M-F.
performance needs to be considered. GP is a piece of crap.
I'll agree with the piece of crap, and that 900gb is plenty, AND that performance ha to be considered if it is getting hammered daily. My experience has been 1 or 2 people using it intermittently throughout the day. Some days, not at all. Just depended on how many payables went out and how many receivables came in. All of our payroll was through a GL import, so not much going on... 🙂
EDIT: Trans Log can become quit large when importing large amounts of data using GP's import. At month end we would import almost 200,000 rows of data. That's right, the chart of accounts was almost 200,000. Might even be that or more now.
lol, we should start a thead about the HORROR's of GP!!! 😛
it is an absolute joke the way Microsoft makes use of its own technology.
i have a GL3000 table with 20 Million records in it!
I'd join that thread for sure!
Jared
CE - Microsoft
April 4, 2012 at 12:56 pm
Ok, So, we have 20 users of which 16 are in full time. We also have a business objects report server that taps into it and we run everything from simple monitors to full 5 year trended analysis reports. In a routine day, we process about 250 orders a day. The warehouse is using MaximumData's InTouch product for which 4 barcode guns are processing the shipping and receiving processes. I would say that while number of receipts is lower than the number of sales, the lines/receipt is higher so the activity on ins and outs is about the same. We have 19,000 products of which 8000 of them are stocked on any given day. We are now running on our 11th year of history in the database.
On recovery, our clients are high maintenance so relying on recovery vs fault tolerance, fault tolerance wins out. For our customers, one of their end users down needing a replacement part for our machines equates to $10K/hr lost productivity per hour minimum.
On our current system, I do a monthly checklinks and set of reconciles. Checklinks currently takes about 6 hours to run and a full inventory reconcile takes 4 hours. Its on a PERC6 card similar specs. Its been since 2008 that I built that one and I think I did mirrors with striping over them based on the layout but I don't exactly remember. it could have been a mirror and an R5 stripe set.
Compared to Oracle eBusiness Suite that our sister sites are dealing with and the way its provided, GP rocks.
April 4, 2012 at 1:03 pm
And I may be wrong, but I thought that Microsoft purchased Great Plains, Navision, and Axapta.
April 4, 2012 at 1:04 pm
Ok, my first thought is that a mirrored server is better than the mirrored drives terms of fault tolerance. We had ours set up that way, and when we did maintenance on the primary and restarted it, our users did not notice a thing. No need to mirror RAID the OS or the application. I think a RAID 1+0 for the t-log and data would suffice. If money is an issue, I wouldn't see a need to separate the 2 physically with the load you will be putting on it.
Jared
CE - Microsoft
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