network monitoring database
We recently (last year) started using RAID 10 for our network monitoring software's database because the original RAID 5 was thrashing the disks regularly.
Initially the number of nodes wasn't very large but each node gets between 6 and 15 updates per minute. As the number of nodes grew with our business it became clear we needed a better solution than RAID 5 or 6.
Our problem stemmed from an initial ignorance of what was actually needed. RAID 5 was cheaper in the beginning but the system as a whole eventually could not tolerate the degraded performance of a bad disk and would cause database corruption and all sorts of other time intensive issues.
Different RAID levels exist for a reason so there are pros and cons to each however it is increasingly becoming difficult for us to justify anything other than RAID 10 for our data center.
In the end we needed to be honest with ourselves in what things actually cost. Performance is an issue and costs us time and money when it is degraded as it directly affects our end users.
