What do you all recommend for the best performance out of the following hardware:

4u Supermicro, 16gb ram, dual quad-core 5310's, 24x1TB WD RE3 SATA 7200 rpm hdd's, 3ware 9650SE 24port SATA RAID controller, 2 of the HDD's as global hot-standby hdd's.

They will be attached to a dozen xen server servers running a bunch of VM's, and I am looking for the best IOPS in general.

From the 3ware level, should I create 1 big raid-10 raid volume and then a bunch of LV's in open-e, and then luns on top of that? Or should I create smaller 3ware raid10 volumes, and then LV's and luns on top of those?

I was also thinking of making smaller 3ware raid-0 volumes and using open-e to do the raid10 via software raid...so many options, looking for best practices that will yield the best performance for IOPS.

We will have 2 of these units in fail-over mode. Each unit also has 8 GE nics for iSCSI to the xen hw pool, so we will most likely bond 2x2ge in multiple bonds and share iscsi over them to increase performance again.

We will also be installing on a smaller scale 2u, 16gb, 8x1tb RE3, 3ware 9690, dual-quads, 6ge...so looking for advice there as well, again in fail-over mode and using VMWare this time.

Help!

Tom