RAID Subsystem

With an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system such as Microsoft
Dynamics AX 2012, the database server generally stores a very large amount of
important data for the business. If this data is unavailable for any length of time,
the business could experience significant financial losses. Using a Redundant
Array of Independent Disks (RAID) can help reduce the possibility of this loss
from occurring. Another important aspect for a database server is fine tuning for
optimal performance. A RAID disk subsystem can also be used to help achieve
this goal.

RAID refers to a group of two or more disks managed as a single unit to store the
data together with additional, or redundant, information to provide recovery if
there is a disk failure. Usually a failed disk in a RAID system can be replaced
while the server is still running. This is one benefit of RAID.

NOTE: More Information on RAID can be found on the Microsoft MSDN web site.

Read/Write Performance: Hardware RAID controllers divide read/writes of all
data from Windows and applications such as Microsoft SQL Server into slices
(usually 16 KB - 128 KB) that are spread across all disks participating in the
RAID array. Splitting data across physical drives distributes the read/write
Input/Output (I/O) workload evenly across all physical hard disk drives
participating in the RAID array. This increases disk I/O performance because the
disks participating in the RAID array are all kept equally busy, instead of some
disks becoming a bottleneck because of irregular distribution of I/O requests.

Fault Tolerance: RAID provides protection from hard disk failure and
accompanying data loss with two methods: mirroring and parity. There are many
types of RAID configurations; each is called a RAID level, but only some RAID
levels are typically used with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.

Regards,
Hossein Karimi