Raid
Raid
What is RAID ?
Advantages of RAID
Cost/Megabyte is dropping. Smaller drives make this possible. Obtain performance of expensive high end disks
Use of small diameter disks. Seek distances lower. High I/O rates, less power/megabyte.
As more devices are added reliability deteriorates. Files may be striped across multiple drives. Creating redundancy in the system. Rebuild files from redundant information.
Mirroring.
Each disk is mirrored. Write operation on two disks. 100% capacity overhead.
Parity.
Failure Prediction
No capacity overhead.
RAID devices can act as a single drive. Allows simultaneous read/write. Overall increase in I/O performance. Provides data redundancy.
RAID Level 0
Nonredundant
RAID Level 1
Mirrored
RAID Level 2
Bit-redundancy
(Hemming Code ECC)
RAID Level 3
Bit-interleaved Parity
RAID Level 4
Block-level Parity
RAID Level 5
Advantages
RAID 6 provides for an extremely high data fault tolerance and can sustain multiple simultaneous drive failures Perfect solution for mission critical applications Disadvantages Very complex controller design Controller overhead to compute parity addresses is extremely high Very poor write performance Requires N+2 drives to implement, because of second parity
RAID 7: Optimised Asynchrony for High I/O Rates as well as High Data Transfer Rates Characteristics/Advantages
Overall write performance is 25% to 90% better than single spindle performance and 1.5 to 6 times better than other array levels Host interfaces are scalable for connectivity or increased host transfer bandwidth Small reads in multi user environment have very high cache hit rate resulting innear zero access times Write performance improves with an increase in the number of drives in the array
Access times decrease with each increase in the number of actuators in the array
No extra data transfers required for parity manipulation RAID 7 is a registered trademark of Storage Computer Corporation.Aa
Disadvantages
One vendor proprietary solution Extremely high cost per MB Very short warranty Not user serviceable
Characteristics/Advantages RAID 10 is implemented as a striped array whose segments are RAID 1 arrays RAID 10 has the same fault tolerance as RAID level 1 RAID 10 has the same overhead for fault-tolerance as mirroring alone High I/O rates are achieved by striping RAID 1 segments Under certain circumstances, RAID 10 array can sustain multiple simultaneous drive failures Excellent solution for sites who would have otherwise gone with RAID 1 but need some additional performance boost
Disadvantages
Very expensive / High overhead
All drives must move in parallel to proper track lowering sustained performance Very limited scalability at a very high inherent cost Recommended Applications
Disadvantages
Very expensive to implement All disk spindles must be synchronised, which limits the choice of drives Byte striping results in poor utilisation of formatted capacity
Windows NT Server 4.0 Supports the following RAID Levels:RAID 1 RAID 5 Disk Mirroring & Duplexing Disk Stripping With Distributed Parity
Allows system and boot partitions to be mirrored. If a member of the mirror set fails, mirror has to be broken and then a new mirror relationship needs to be created when a faulty disk is replaced. Allows disk duplexing which often is not supported by hardware implementations of RAID.
Boot or system partitions cannot be part of a stripe set with parity. Requires a minimum of 3 disks. Parity information is stripped across all disks. This means that in effect the storage space of 1 disk is lost due to the parity overhead.
After a disk failure the fault tolerance driver uses the parity information to regenerate the data of the failed disk into RAM, having a detrimental effect on performance. If using RAID 5 Microsoft recommends adding 25% more memory to the system. To recover from a disk failure, a failed disk needs to be replaced and the data needs to be regenerated on the free space on the replaced disk, using disk administrator.
Uses Dedicated Hardware to Control Disks in Array Rather Than Software. Disks in Array Are Controlled By:
RAID Controller Internally Inside PC/Server. By Separate External System That Contains Raid Controller and Disks of Array.
No software configuration is required in operating system. RAID Level is not limited by operating system support.
Enable the use of hot swapping and hot spares of a drive in an array, in the event of failure. Enable the use of redundant power supplies. Allow re-building of array with failed drive, whilst system is on-line.
System operates in degraded state. Lose fault tolerance until array is re-built.
Read performance is better than a single drive, but not as good as many other RAID levels. Write performance is worse than writing to one drive, but better than many other RAID levels. After a disk failure read performance reduces, write performance improves. Rebuild is generally fast.
Read performance varies from good to excellent for larger stripes. Parity information is not required during requests to read data. Write performance is poorer than other RAID levels due to the overhead of parity information. After a disk failure or during rebuilding, system performance can dramatically reduce due to parity information being distributed over the drives in the array.
Used for applications requiring fault tolerance where the funds required for the hardware for disk stripping are not available and where applications are write intensive. Applications for RAID 1 include:
Accounting and Financial Systems Small Database Systems Individual Users Requiring Fault Tolerance.
Used in systems which require good performance, good fault tolerance with efficient high capacity storage. Applications for RAID 5 include:
Less suitable for write intensive applications as performance in write heavy environments decreases.
Disk recovery
RAID Implementation
Software
Outboard DASD Inboard DASD Disk controlers
Software
Kernel Append mode MD Multi-Device module Raid-0
Raid-1
> Raid-5 Modules:
Raid-1
Raid-4 Raid-5
Software
Logical Volume Manager A single disk viewed by the user Hot-plug support SCSI and IDE disks Cheapest Low-end casual environment
Inboard DASD
Appears as a drive
Bus-to-bus converters SCSI-toSCSI, EIDE-to-EIDE
Disk Controllers
Plugged cards Via I/O bus Driver loaded in the kernel Less operations to be handle by the Operating System
Performance
Softwares for cheap and light work-load
Controler cards for heavy work-load