Session 3 Windows Platform Dina Alkhoudari

Learning Objectives Understanding Server Storage Technologies Direct Attached Storage DAS Network-Attached Storage NAS Storage-Area Network SAN Identify main RAID levels Basic Disks vs Dynamic Discs Implement main RAID levels using Windows 2008 Server

Understanding Server Storage Technologies - DAS Direct Attached Storage A storage attached to one server only Ex: set of internal hard disks within a server Feature: provides a single server with fast, block-based data access to storage directly through an internal or external bus Best Usage: servers that need good performance and do not need enormous amounts of storage like (DNS, WINS, DHCP servers) Limitations: DAS is directly accessible from a single server only which leads to inefficient storage management In Windows Server 2008: The main tool to manage DAS is Disk Management console and Diskpart.exe command line utility

Understanding Server Storage Technologies - DAS

Understanding Server Storage Technologies - NAS Network-Attached Storage A self-contained storage that other severs and clients can easily access over the network It is a preconfigured server that runs an OS Feature: simple to implement and can provide a large amount of storage space to clients and servers on a LAN Limitations: access to data is slower and file-based as opposed to block-based Best Usage: in file servers, Web servers and other servers that don’t need extremely fast access to data

Understanding Server Storage Technologies - NAS

Understanding Server Storage Technologies - SAN Storage-Area Networks Are high performance networks dedicated to delivering block data between servers and storage subsystems SAN is made up of special devices including HBAs on the host servers, switches that help route storage traffic, disk storage subsystems and tape libraries Best Usage: servers that requires fast access to very large amounts of data such as mail servers, backup servers, streaming media servers, application servers and database servers In Windows Server 2008: windows server 2008 include the Virtual Disk Service (VDS) to expose disk subsystems and SAN hardware to administrative tools in Windows like (SMfs, Storage Explorer, iSCSI initiator, Disk RAID)

Understanding Server Storage Technologies - SAN

RAID Concept RAID: Redundant Array of Independent Disks A technology that provides increased storage functions and reliability Combining multiple disk drive components into a logical unit

Definitions Parity Error Correcting Code (ECC) Striping

RAID 0 RAID-0 is known as data striping The data is broken down into several smaller, equally sized pieces This process increases I/O bandwidth by simultaneously accessing multiple disks It does not offer any redundancy RAID-0 is ideal for high bandwidth applications Creating RAID 0 in windows server 2008

RAID 0

RAID 1 – Disk Mirroring creating a single logical disk drive from two physical disk drives All data written to the logical drive is written to the two physical disk drives increases the performance of reading and writing data provides full fault tolerant for a single drive failure

RAID 1 – Disk Mirroring

RAID 5 A Block-level striping with a distributed parity Needs at least 3 physical disk drives Data is stripped across all disk drives The parity is also striped across all disk drives In the case of disk failure, a computation lost data stored in the failed disk is performed mathematically Performing RAID 5 in windows server 2008

RAID 5

Dynamic Disks vs. Basic Disks 1. Basic Disk A basic disk is a physical disk that contains primary partitions, extended partitions, or logical drives. on disks that use the master boot record (MBR) partition style, you can create up to four primary partitions per basic disk, or you can create up to three primary partitions and one extended partition with unlimited logical drives. on disks that use the GUID partition table (GPT) partition style, you can create up to 128 primary partitions, and you do not need to create extended partitions or logical drives.

Dynamic Disks vs. Basic Disks 1. Dynamic Disk Provides advanced features that basic disks do not. The ability to create unlimited number of volumes that span multiple disks, and fault-tolerant volumes. Earlier versions of Windows (such as Windows NT, Windows 98, and Windows ME) cannot access dynamic disks. Dynamic disks are compatible only with Windows operating systems. Basic disks are automatically converted to dynamic when necessary

Dynamic Disks Simple Spanned Striped Mirrored RAID 5

RAID 0+1 or RAID 1+0 RAID 0+1 or 01: a mirror of stripes, essentially twin copies of a striped volume constructed by creating RAID 0 sets and then mirroring them RAID 1+0 or 10: a stripe of mirrors in which the data is striped across multiple mirrored sets. constructed but first creating a series of mirror sets and then building a RAID 0 set across the mirror set Although you cannot create them in Windows, both of these solutions allocate 50 percent of the disks for fault tolerance, and both offer excellent read and write performance.

Configuring a Mount Point A mount point is a folder in a volume that acts as a pointer to the root directory of another volume

End of Session