No, not Raid® Brand Insecticides for the “bugs”… (if it were only that easy )!

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) configurations have come to the forefront of discussions recently for our new customers and customers upgrading to Seventh Edition; most likely due to the updated requirements for Seventh Edition (see Project Center System Requirements in our Help system). 

The Support and Services team as well as others here at Newforma often get asked:

What’s the best RAID configuration for Newforma?

It’s a fair and thoughtful question, especially given the increased disk usage that Seventh Edition puts on the Project Center Server (where all the Newforma specific project data is now managed in the MySQL database on the server, increasing the read/write to the disk).

The simple answer, which is also, fortunately, the honest answer, is Newforma Project Center Servers (and Info Exchange Servers) will run just fine in any RAID configuration.  As long as your Server meets or exceeds the specifications, the RAID configuration you choose should have very little impact on performance.  Newforma does recommend not using “RAID 0” as some sort of redundancy is always smart.

The analogy I like to give is, as long as you buy a Ferrari (i.e. a high performance machine) then the RAID you chose to deploy on the machine would be like choosing a spoiler to slightly improve performance or anti-sway-bars to slightly improve stability (OK, I’m not a big fan of spoilers either, but don’t throw out the entire analogy just because of my aesthetic faux-pas).  In the end, with or without the add-ons, you’ve got a Ferrari, and you will be well served!!

We have customers successfully and happily using Newforma on RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 10.  There may be other RAIDs in use, but those seem to be the most common, and in our travels, RAID 5 seems to be the most common.  Price, disk space, desired fault tolerance, error detection and correction, etc. all play into which RAID different I.T. organizations chose for their servers.  The bottom line is Newforma loves them all!

So, with that said, I’ll put it back to you… which RAID did you chose or are you considering for your configuration and why.  If you had to do it over again would you change your RAID or not… why or why not?

My team and I as well as others in the extended Newforma family (Customers and Partners) would love to hear from you on this topic.

I have not made up my mind but I am leaning towards RAID 10 over RAID 5.
I’m not going to get into the “is RAID10 RAID1+0 or RAID0+1, and does RAID6 count in the thought process of RAID5…”.  In my limited experience I’ll do what seems best, but when it comes down to real-world performance we’re typically simply not large enough to generate a demand load that can appreciate one vs. another.  In fact, my NPCS did not meet your official system requirements for 6e, but because we’re so lightweight some of the benchmarks I was getting were exceptional (I attributed that to a solid gigabit solution).  I know that may be out the door with 7e, but just saying.  Actually I don’t know what I’m saying.

My vote: RAID 10. There are other factors that play into I/O performance. For instance, 10K RPM SAS drives will perform better than 7200 RPM SATA drives. A controller with lots of cache memory (512MB or more) will also help.

We use RAID 1 with 7200RPM SATA drives on our dedicated server with no issues (only 20 projects, 10 users and about 1.5TB of data.) After adding a few more drives, I may rebuild with RAID 10 sometime in the near future.

We’re configured with RAID 5 here with ~650 projects and ~3TB working data set.

My experience suggests that we’re being limited more by our current 32-bit server OS than we are by our disk subsystem so I can’t really say if the RAID 5 config is hurting us at all.  Conventional wisdom suggests that something like RAID 10 is the best choice for DB I/O but I’m not in a position to independently confirm that for the Newforma use case.