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TiernanO
Asked: 2011-05-04 03:37:51 +0800 CST

SQL Server on EC2: What way do i set up the EBS

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Good morning.

We have a service with a SQL box on Amazon EC2 and, as suggested on this question, we are using EBS to store the data... the problem is, What is the best way to setup the storage?

At the moment, during the Development phase, we have 4 10Gb "Disks" (should be enough for the next while, might look into more later) in RAID 0 (this worries me...). We take backups every 3 hours of the SQL box itself, but i am worried about the RAID 0 and loosing an EBS volume causing us to loose a couple hours of data...

Im just wondering, given that we are running Windows, what is the best practice for this? RAID 1? 10? 5? Something else?

Thanks.

sql-server backup amazon-ec2 raid database-backup

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    EBS Volumes have a lower AFR than regular commodity hard disks (They are redundant behind the EBS abstraction) so RAID 0 for speed and reliable I/O is usually used.

    However, this is coupled with frequent backup and recovery mechanisms in case of a drive failure. Alternatively, use RAID 10, it will still be faster than a single disk and help smooth out errors with some redundancy. There is enough built in fail-safes to EBS volumes that you should be more worried about alternative failure modes instead of single drive failure.

    PS: Go for 8 Drives, speed seems to increase linearly in Linux for RAID 0 when the drives are in powers of 2. Not sure if it is a factor of the software RAID or the EBS system itself.

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