Exercise 1 Business Profile: A telecom company, involved in mobile wireless serv
ID: 3759991 • Letter: E
Question
Exercise 1
Business Profile:
A telecom company, involved in mobile wireless services across the country, has about 5000 employees worldwide. This company has 7 regional offices across the country. Although the company is financially doing well, they continue to feel the competitive pressure. As a result, the company needs to ensure that the IT infrastructure takes advantage of fault tolerant features.
Current Configuration and Challenges:
The company uses different applications for communication, accounting, and management. All the applications are hosted on individual servers with disks configured as RAID 0.
All financial activity is managed and tracked by a single accounting application. It is very important for the accounting data to be highly available.
The application performs around 15% random write operations and the remaining 85% are random reads.
The accounting data is currently stored on a 5-disk RAID 0 set. Each disk has an advertised formatted capacity of 200 GB and the total size of their files is 730 GB.
The company performs nightly backups and removes old information — so the amount of data is unlikely to change much over the next 6 months.
The company is approaching the end of the financial year and the IT budget is depleted. It won’t be possible to buy even one new disk drive.
Tasks:
1. Recommend a RAID level that the company can use to restructure their environment fulfilling their needs.
2. Justify your choice based on cost, performance, and availability of the new solution.
Exercise 2
Business Profile:
A telecom company, involved in mobile wireless services across the country, has about 5000 employees worldwide. This company has 7 regional offices across the country. Although the company is financially doing well, they continue to feel the competitive pressure. As a result, the company needs to ensure that the IT infrastructure takes advantage of fault tolerant features.
Current Configuration and Challenges:
The company uses an accounting application that is hosted on an individual server with disks configured as RAID 0.
It is now the beginning of a new financial year and the IT department has an increased budget. You are called in to recommend changes to their database environment.
You investigate their database environment closely and observe that the data is stored on a 6-disk RAID 0 set. Each disk has an advertised formatted capacity of 200 GB and the total size of their files is 900 GB.
The amount of data is likely to change by 30 % over the next 6 months and your solution must accommodate this growth.
The application performs around 40% write operations and the remaining 60 % are reads.
Tasks:
1. Recommend a RAID level that the company can use to restructure their environment and fulfill their needs.
2. What is the cost of the new solution?
3. Justify your choice based on cost, performance, and data availability of the new solution.
Note: A new 200 GB disk drive costs $1000. The controller can handle all commonly used RAID levels, so will not need to be replaced.
Explanation / Answer
Exercise 1:
In systems with three or more drives (like in this case with 5 disks ), recommend that you set the system to RAID 5. This gives the user the best of both worlds: fast performance by striping data across all drives; data protection by dedicating a quarter of each drive to fault tolerance leaving three quarters of the system capacity available for data storage.
Exercise 2:
1. Recommend to Implement RAID 5.
2. No Additional Cost as the Company can implement RAID 5 with the existing ones .Effort wil be there to take back up of the data and reconfigured the disks as RAID5
3. No Additional Cost , performace will little less as compared to RAID 0 but not much and data avaiability is much more and RAID 5 provides much better fault tolerance than any other RAID options .
Total space you get from the array corresponds to S * (n-1), where S is the size of the smallest disk, and n is the number of disks.
******About RAID 5*******
Data is striped across a group of disk drives with distributed parity. Parity information is written to a different disk in the array for each stripe.
Redundancy
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Parity is distributed across the disks in the array. Data is regenerated in the event of a drive failure.
Performance
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High performance in small record, multiprocessing environments because there is no contention for the parity disk and read and write operations can be overlapped. No write bottlenecks as with RAID 4.
Drawbacks
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Distributed parity causes overhead on write operations. There is also overhead created when data is changed, because parity information must be located and then recalculated.
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