In most cases, you require RAID-based storage to achieve your storage requirements. To maintain performance and reliability, consider hardware-based RAID rather than software-based RAID. To achieve redundancy on striped arrays while maintaining performance, consider the RAID scheme carefully.

RAID level 5 is popular to arrange cost-effective methods of achieving redundancy while keeping a good read performance. However, write actions on RAID level 5 will cost performance for storing parity bits. Therefore, in most cases discussed, a RAID1 or RAID10 should be considered. The RAID controller should also provide a battery-backed read and write cache to aid performance and prevent data corruption at power failures.

Before you use partitions on a storage area network (SAN), consider the I/O load together with any other applications that are already using the SAN to ensure that the performance can be maintained.

Ideally, discuss the implementation with the storage vendor or responsible to ensure that you achieve the best performance. Typically, you should create LUNs across as many suitable disks as possible, using entire disks rather than partial disks to prevent multiple I/O-intensive applications from using the same disks.