Exchange 2007 and tiering on EMC VNX

You *can* use tiering with Exchange, but the question is if you *should* use
it.

Tiering is all about data skew, small amount of data holding large amount of
IOPS, and Exchange generally have a very low skew (it spread IOPS across all
the consumed space). So you should have small benefit by tiering Exchange DB.

Plus, Exchange online maintenance is a very IO intensive workload that runs
every night and may be impacted by tiering, because you may have FAST moving
blocks together with online maintenance or, some decisions made by fast during
day workload (users) may not be good for nigh workload (maintenance).

   Hello Rafa, thanks for your feedback.

   Independently of tiering, is RAID1 mandatory for Exchange 2007 databases and logs or RAID5 could be used?

   Best regards, EEOC.

For LOG, use RAID1

For DB you can use both, it will depend on IOPS requirement and size of your mailboxes. For small mailboxes, probably RAID1 will require less amount of disks. For large mailboxes, RAID5 should be a better choice.

We can help in that decision! Let us know the requirements