Monday 20 April 2009

What a difference a drive makes!

We are through the gauntlet on this Swing migration and heading towards the home stretch!

The box we are working with is an IBM XSeries dual 3.4GHz with three new 146GB 15K SCSI U320 drives for a total of six.

The server's RAM was also bumped up to 4GB from 2GB.

Once through the Swing and with SBS fully installed and configured we have been very impressed with the speed of the reboots and boot ups.

We have other similar configurations out there with SATA based RAID arrays and this one just kills them performance wise.

There are four 10,000 RPM drives configured in a RAID 1+0 array for just shy of 300GB with two hot spares that were original to the box.

They just scream!

We learned that we needed to navigate IBM's awesome support site to find the ISO containing a utility to configure that RAID array in a not so intuitive way ;)

We also learned that the IBM all in one update utility actually does a good job bringing all of the Windows drivers up to date. There was also another utility that creates a bootable USB flash drive to update the system's firmware components.

Now that we are through the production run of the Swing, the test run we did last week sure has paid off. The main concern now is Group Policy tattoos and some of the Line of Business applications that may not adjust.

Soon we will know as we need to be back here at 07:00hrs.

Philip

Sent from my SBS Integrated Windows Mobile® phone.

No comments: