VERITAS Volume Manager 3.1 Administrator's Guide

Introduction to Volume Manager
Virtual Object Data Organization (Volume Layouts)
Chapter 142
Figure 1-11 Striping Across Three Disks (Columns)
A stripe consists of the set of stripe units at the same positions across all
columns. In Figure 1-11, Striping Across Three Disks (Columns),, stripe
units 1, 2, and 3 constitute a single stripe.
Viewed in sequence, the first stripe consists of:
• stripe unit 1 in column 1
• stripe unit 2 in column 2
• stripe unit 3 in column 3
The second stripe consists of:
• stripe unit 4 in column 1
• stripe unit 5 in column 2
• stripe unit 6 in column 3
Striping continues for the length of the columns (if all columns are the
same length) or until the end of the shortest column is reached. Any
space remaining at the end of subdisks in longer columns becomes
unused space.
Striping is useful if you need large amounts of data written to or read
from the physical disks quickly by using parallel data transfer to
multiple disks. Striping is also helpful in balancing the I/O load from
Plex
Subdisk 1
Subdisk 2
Subdisk 3
SU1
SU2
SU3 SU6
SU5
SU4
Column 1
Column 2
Column 3
SU = Stripe Unit