I mentioned in my previous post that I’m presenting at the inaugural PING Philly meetup and my topic is on sizing and configuring backend storage. One of the main points I want to stress in my discussion is the importance that IOPS have when planning your storage configuration. To help illustrate this importance, I created a simple RAID group calculator that shows an estimate of the total backend IOPS required to satisfy your application’s performance needs. Here’s the link to the calculator: http://www.eprich.com/tools/simple-raid-group-calculator
Another thing to note is that this calculator is my first javascript project. Thanks to the incredible teaching skills (and infinite patience) of @jpirrello, I was able to complete this calculator in about a day’s worth of time. The calculator has a slight bias towards EMC hardware – specifically the disks. (Sorry NetApp, I still think you’re cool though!) As of now, the disk sizes don’t play any role in the calculator. That will be in the next version 
I also made some assumptions on the total IOPS per disk. Here’s the break down:
SSD = ~5250 IOPS
15K = ~175 IOPS
10K = ~135 IOPS
7.2K = ~75 IOPS
These estimates are the average of a variety of drives I’ve found on the interent. I also compared them to this: http://blog.aarondelp.com/2009/10/its-now-all-about-iops.html.
I’d like to add more functionality to the calculator, so feel free to add comments below with your thoughts and suggestions for how I can improve it!