Is basing storage requirements based on IOPS sufficient?
- by Boden
The current system in question is running SBS 2003, and is going to be migrated on new hardware to SBS 2008. Currently I'm seeing on average 200-300 disk transfers per second total across all the arrays in the system. The array seeing the bulk of activity is a 6 disk 7200RPM RAID 6 and it struggles to keep up during high traffic times (idle time often only 10-20%; response times peaking 20-50+ ms). Based on some rough calculations this makes sense (avg ~245 IOPS on this array at 70/30 read to write ratio).
I'm considering using a much simpler disk configuration using a single RAID 10 array of 10K disks. Using the same parameters for my calculations above, I'm getting 583 average random IOPS / sec.
Granted SBS 2008 is not the same beast as 2003, but I'd like to make the assumption that it'll be similar in terms of disk performance, if not better (Exchange 2007 is easier on the disk and there's no ISA server).
Am I correct in believing that the proposed system will be sufficient in terms of performance, or am I missing something? I've read so much about recommended disk configurations for various products like Exchange, and they often mention things like dedicating spindles to logs, etc. I understand the reasoning behind this, but if I've got more than enough random I/O overhead, does it really matter? I've always at the very least had separate spindles for the OS, but I could really reduce cost and complexity if I just had a single, good performing array.
So as not to make you guys do my job for me, the generic version of this question is: if I have a projected IOPS figure for a new system, is it sufficient to use this value alone to spec the storage, ignoring "best practice" configurations? (given similar technology, not going from DAS to SAN or anything)
