Hardware planning for growth

We are configuring a new database server at work. I have decided to do a RAI
D
1 Array for the transaction log and a RAID 5 array for the data.
The fastest growing part of our database is a table that stores photos. It
is currently about 12Gb in size. We expect it to grow the next few years by
17Gb, 26Gb, 33Gb, then platueau at 37Gb growth a year. At the end of year 5
that puts us at about 165Gb, and at the end of year 10 at about 500Gb.
Although these are rough projections, I still need to be able to begin
planning accordingly.
What is the best hardware configuration to allow this kind of growth? I
would like something that is expandable, so that I can buy according to our
current needs, and add to it as needed.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
-DanHi
In effect, you can only plan for the next 3-4 years. By then, the current
disk subsystems will need to be retired.
In effect, you need about 150Gb for Data and probably 400Gb for backups
during this period. A few 147Gb drives will do the job nicely.
For best performance have a seperate SCSI controller for the logs, backup
and data drives. You may want to split the data up into 2 drive sets to get
better throughput.
With the size and price of drives, do you really need RAID-5? What about
RAD-10? The write performance is just so much better.
Do you need high abailabilty? If so, you need to look at Windows Clusters.
This will guide you in the direction of the drive enclosure as it will need
to be a SAN. EMC has a few nice babies.
Regards
Mike
"Dan" wrote:

> We are configuring a new database server at work. I have decided to do a R
AID
> 1 Array for the transaction log and a RAID 5 array for the data.
> The fastest growing part of our database is a table that stores photos. It
> is currently about 12Gb in size. We expect it to grow the next few years b
y
> 17Gb, 26Gb, 33Gb, then platueau at 37Gb growth a year. At the end of year
5
> that puts us at about 165Gb, and at the end of year 10 at about 500Gb.
> Although these are rough projections, I still need to be able to begin
> planning accordingly.
> What is the best hardware configuration to allow this kind of growth? I
> would like something that is expandable, so that I can buy according to ou
r
> current needs, and add to it as needed.
> Any advice is greatly appreciated.
> -Dan|||Hi Dan,
Statistically speaking the company you are working for will not be in
business in 10 years! Anyhow. Let me tell you what I did for one of our
businesses that had a quad-processor (700 MHZ) server running SQL Server:
1-got a dual processor (3 GHZ) server.
2-Got 15000 RPM drives (50% in disk speed increase right of the bat!)
3-Created 3 RAID 1 arrays: one for OS, one for DB and one of transaction
log. Make sure that your controller supports split seeks, which devides the
read I/Os among the mirrored pair, allowing two disks to seek simultaneously
.
Ideally you can use RAID 10.
4-be carefull with the edition of SQL Server. The server edition will limit
SQL to use a max. of 2 GB. Also, you will not be able to create indexes on
views.
Microsoft SQL Administrator's companion book has a section on Capacity
Planning (for memory, processor, disk-subsystem) that you can have a look.
The problem we had with our quad-processor server was that we had to pay
close to 10,000$ to get 2 more CPUs since they were older CPUs. Note also
that storage often becomes a problem. With 200 servers to maintain by our
team, we often need to plan some upgrades for servers that are running low i
n
HD space (after few years) so make sure you have enough space on your
database server. Last think, it is very hard to load balance a SQL Server
(manual process as far as I know) because chances are that new servers will
get data from your database server in the future and/or the load will
increase.
"Dan" wrote:

> We are configuring a new database server at work. I have decided to do a R
AID
> 1 Array for the transaction log and a RAID 5 array for the data.
> The fastest growing part of our database is a table that stores photos. It
> is currently about 12Gb in size. We expect it to grow the next few years b
y
> 17Gb, 26Gb, 33Gb, then platueau at 37Gb growth a year. At the end of year
5
> that puts us at about 165Gb, and at the end of year 10 at about 500Gb.
> Although these are rough projections, I still need to be able to begin
> planning accordingly.
> What is the best hardware configuration to allow this kind of growth? I
> would like something that is expandable, so that I can buy according to ou
r
> current needs, and add to it as needed.
> Any advice is greatly appreciated.
> -Dan