Good HD Setup for a small office server

[roveer]

I have to build a new file server for my small office which serves a few functions. The server is our main file storage area, lots of documents, 10's of thousands of pictures etc. The server also runs MS Exchange and will also run Blackberry BES 10.1 software to synch our phones with our mail. The server will run MS Small Business Server 2011.

I'm interested in what people thing is the best HD setup in terms of boot drive, data drive, raid setups etc.

Our current server has a 2 drive boot array, Raid 1 (mirroring) using an adaptec raid controller. The data drive is a 8 drive array (raid 5) on a separate adaptec controller. I wanted to separate the boot and data drives and use separate controllers to give as much redundancy and separation as possible.

For my new server, I'm going to use a Dell system, and must decide whether to do something similar or if I should consider something different. Please comment.

Roveer

 

[ddrueding]

What sort of capacity requirements are you looking at? RAID1 is great, RAID5 not so much. SSD is awesome if you can afford it, particularly for things like Exchange.

Two arrays probably will be the best option, SSDs in RAID1 for the OS, Exchange, BES, etc. and a RAID10 of 3-4TB drives for data, depending on capacity requirements.

 

[roveer]

What sort of capacity requirements are you looking at? RAID1 is great, RAID5 not so much. SSD is awesome if you can afford it, particularly for things like Exchange.

Two arrays probably will be the best option, SSDs in RAID1 for the OS, Exchange, BES, etc. and a RAID10 of 3-4TB drives for data, depending on capacity requirements.

While I love SSD's, It's just not necessary in this configuration. This is already an overkill server (capacity and cost) for a 4 users environment. SSD's are just not necessary here.

For boot drive, will probably use (2) 500gb drives in raid 1 configuration. For data array will probably use (4) 1tb drives in raid 5 configuration. My current system uses Adaptec Raid 6 for data which allows for failure of 2 drives. Since the hardware is all DELL, I'm guessing their current controller will have whatever I the latest raid 5+ variation if one exists and I'll consider using it. I'll look into Raid 10. A lot has changed since the last time I did this.

I'm really trying to determine if the separate boot disk and data disk method is still relevant. I will say that in 7 years I had one failure (turned out to be bad RAM) which took out my boot drive array. Once I restored from backup (just a quick 200 megs, exchange is on the data drive), the server came back up and the data drive was just fine, all 2TB of it. Kind of solidifies my thinking about separate drives (boot and data).

Roveer

 

[Mercutio]

Yes, maintaining data separately from OS and application is quite handy for backup and recovery as well as maintaining a generally high level of performance. It's a good idea all around.

Yes, it's a good idea to have your OS drive in RAID1, but if you can tolerate an hour of down time for a restore and have a limited budget for these things it's more important to make sure you have a reliable backup and redundancy of your user data.

No RAID is a backup ever.

If you're using a PERC6, you should be able to do RAID6 no problem. That's a good idea for data in the density you're proposing. For a SOHO server and a limited number of users, I doubt you'll have any serious performance constraints and anyway Exchange is a "lots of little files" sort of load so RAID10 probably won't be a huge help even with being able to seek on multiple spindles.

I will say that I have a strong preference for maintaining hardware-independent Windows servers using a hypervisor of one sort or other, but Exchange is such a pig for disk I/O that I'd have to think long and hard about the underlying hardware.

 

[Howell]

Since you have so few users and are at a transition point, have you considered doing away with exchange and going to a hosted solution.

 

[Mercutio]

CHRIST YES

 

[LiamC]

Don't bother with RAID for your boot/OS drive.

Get all your OS/applications installed and configured.
Take a snapshot with Macrium Reflect or something similar.
Copy the image to your data drive/RAID solution and to something portable that you can take offsite. Redundancy is great. Redundancy is great. Update this image often. Murphy says that time you forget to update this image, he will arrive to teach you the error of your ways.

Backups <> Recovery

You mentioned redundancy. If you are going down the path of redundancy, what about motherboards/cpu/power? If you lose a power supply what will you do? Motherboard? The fastest way back up is with something identical.

Is recovery time important? Can you stand a days outage? Half a day? You may be better of with two identical but lesser specced servers. If this isn't important, what you've done so far is pretty good.

 

[Mercutio]

There's a really good reason to use Windows backup with Exchange, which is that many backup tools aren't Exchange-aware unless you buy some goofy add-on module and standard backup apps don't clean up Exchange's logs or properly snapshot its database. If you're using something like Reflect or TrueImage Server, you're going to wind up with a full drive before too long and a mail store that won't mount cleanly after a restore. At the very least that means using Windows Backup in addition to some other backup product.

 

[Bozo]

If you use Macrium, you can schedule it to run at predetermined ( overnight? ) times to ensure your backups are current.

 

[roveer]

There's a really good reason to use Windows backup with Exchange, which is that many backup tools aren't Exchange-aware unless you buy some goofy add-on module and standard backup apps don't clean up Exchange's logs or properly snapshot its database. If you're using something like Reflect or TrueImage Server, you're going to wind up with a full drive before too long and a mail store that won't mount cleanly after a restore. At the very least that means using Windows Backup in addition to some other backup product.

I had read this a long time ago and use Windows Backup for my boot drive snapshot. On one occasion I lost my boot drive and had to restore from backup and it worked without issue.