User's Manual

38 Understanding RAID Concepts
fault-tolerance is achieved by maintaining redundant data. Redundant
data includes mirrors (duplicate data) and parity information
(reconstructing data using an algorithm).
•
Performance —Read and write performance can be increased or decreased
depending on the RAID level you choose. Some RAID levels may be more
appropriate for particular applications.
•
Cost efficiency —Maintaining the redundant data or parity information
associated with RAID volumes requires additional disk space. In situations
where the data is temporary, easily reproduced, or non-essential, the
increased cost of data redundancy may not be justified.
•
Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) —Using additional disks to
maintain data redundancy also increases the chance of disk failure at any
given moment. Although this cannot be avoided in situations where
redundant data is a requirement, it does have implications for the
workload of your organization’s system support staff.
•
Volume —Volume refers to a single disk non-RAID virtual disk. You can
create volumes using external utilities like the O-ROM <Ctrl+R>.
Storage Management does not support the creation of volumes. However,
you can view volumes and use drives from these volumes for creation of
new virtual disks or Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) of existing virtual
disks, provided free space is available. Storage Management allows
Rename and Delete operations on such volumes.
For more information, see Choosing RAID Levels and Concatenation.
Choosing RAID Levels and Concatenation
You can use RAID or concatenation to control data storage on multiple disks.
Each RAID level or concatenation has different performance and data
protection characteristics.
The following sub-sections provide specific information on how each RAID
level or concatenation store data as well as their performance and protection
characteristics:
• Concatenation
• RAID Level 0 (Striping)
• RAID Level 1 (Mirroring)