Best practices for configuring default local volumes

The default local volume (also referred to as the store and forward volume) is a real volume, storing production data. The production data is transferred to the destination volume relatively soon (depending on the load, and how you have configured the volume), but you must still consider upload requirements. The volume must have the expected availability and reliability you require from a production data volume. Siemens Digital Industries Software recommends RAID 5 or better. It is best to ensure that once a file is uploaded to the destination volume, any remote requests for that file are retrieved from the cache, not the destination volume. Keep in mind that once a file is transferred to the destination volume, any download request for that file is delivered from the destination volume. If the request comes from a remote user who has just uploaded the file, this represents a WAN hop, producing the WAN penalty just avoided by using store and forward functionality. Note Normal cache flushing and expiration rules apply to local default volume files.