I've just been to the TINST course (Attain Installation) at Navision in the Netherlands, and had quite a discussion on the setup of the RAID system. Navision advices to set up a RAID 1, with database parts preferably not larger then 2 GB, all on different physical disks. That hasn't changed for years now. RAID 0+1 and RAID 5 are totally out of the question (according to Navision, that is). However, they could not provide me with any (new) benchmarks on the performance of the various RAIDsets.
I do understand that the above method has the highest performance rates (as Attain has it's own database managment system). However, It's very hard to persuade my clients that they have to by 32 disks (RAID1), and only 32GB will be used. They prefer a RAID1 set of 2 disks (1 and the mirror), or a RAID5 set. With Attain it is possible to create very large files (Navision has just upped the level to 128 GB), and I was wondering if and when using one large database file, which RAID set (not 0, as it has no redundancy) would give the best performance? RAID1 or RAID5?
Personally I think it should be possible to disable the DBMS which splits the data in various parts, and just let the RAID controller handle it... (no chance of seeing that happening soon, I'm afraid...
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Comments
//Lars Westman
http://www.linkedin.com/in/larswestman
Number of users ? 3, 30 or 300 ?
Type of company ?
The Navision recommended setup is the BEST setup you can get.
But your customer might do with less.
I guess making the database parts larger than 2 G will hurt less.
eg. 3 GB or 4 GB.
But you will need to start with 4 (8) disks or 5 (10).
If the total DB start size is 5 GB, then start with 5 parts of 1 GB
on 5 disks.
Best regards
Per