Sage 100

Sage 100 2014 Premium... Does Sage have a written recommendation on how to partition the server as to optimize a Sage 100 premium installation? Any suggestions? ie 1 system/OS partition and 1 programs/data partition that contains the SQL server and Sage 100 programs and data?

Not sure about Sage writeups, or what they would be worth, as the Sage 100 developers don't appear to have heard of bcp, but here is my recommendation: C:\ drive - OS only - if Windows gets hosed you don't have to wipe your applications. D:\ for applications and data E:\ for SQL logs (only useful if on another physical drive from D:\)

I agree with Phil's recommendations above. In the Sage 500 world, we even went so far as separate tempdb as well. Please note, using separate partitions really doesn't accomplish the goals you are trying to achieve. The bottleneck with SQL is in disk access and therefore, you want to use separate spindles with dedicated read/write heads. The reason to separate log files and data files is the way data is written to and read from. Logs are sequential; data is not. Therefore, you will get better performance if your log files are on a set of drives where the read/write heads can keep from bouncing around. For reports and queries, tempdb can see heavy usage so separating it from data access optimizes the system to maximize the bottle-necked resources; the read/write heads on the spindles. I hope this helps.

Thanks guys!.. This helps a lot. Does it help performance or improve reliability / uptime to have the c (system) partition be its own physical drive? We also need to recommend a RAID configuration... Any recommendations on number of physical drives, and a RAID level?

Physical or virtual servers? It makes a difference.

@GaryFeldman Physical server. I understand if it is a virtual server that all instances share the same hardware... hardly performance-enhancing... that's one of my arguments against virtual for the ERP configuration.

So for physical the recommendation varies by software but we often see RAID 10 for the primary SQL partition. Raid 5 is also common but not as performance oriented I believe. With regard to virtual, we use different types of storage for different virtual devices, so although generally true that multiple host machines share same virtual infrastructure, not 100% true. Typically you will see in the 9x% performance range compared to a similar physical device, but the storage is somewhat different depending upon whether the storage enclosure is on the same backplane or not. The newest devices offer really fast throughput.

I am for RAID 10 with use of 15k RPM drives. RAID 1 would be next preference. What you see a lot out there is RAID 5 with three to five 10k RPM drives in the array. The more drives you add the more duplicates Writes there are and the less performance oriented it becomes just as @GaryFeldman said.

Thanks Alnoor.