1. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 1 RAID General Concept Auteur : Franck THOMAS

2. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 2 RAID Basics  RAID : Redundant Arrays of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks  Definition : Simultaneous use of two or more drives in order to add fault tolerance, capacity and/or performance to data storage system

3. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 3 HDD Performance  Technologies offer different price and performances  Specification with impact on performances: rotation speed, cache size, cache management (NCQ), port Technology 7.2k RPM 10k RPM15k RPM Dual Port (=full duplex) SATAYES NO SCSINOYES NO SASNOYES SCSI hard disk are no more used in servers or workstations since end of 2008. They have been replaced by SAS HDD.

4. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 4 RAID 0  RAID 0 (stripping): Data are stripped on all disks Offer performances No redundancy 2 disks minimum, maximum depending of RAID controller Data are split depending of stripe size (16/32/64/128KB) controller With software RAID, there is also concatenation / spanning mode

5. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 5 JBOD controller JBOD Disk “JBOD”: Just a Bunch of Disk A JBOD disk is physically connected to RAID controller but doesn’t use the RAID functionalities. This disk is usable as if it was connected to simple SCSI controller The goal is to have RAID drives and non RAID drives into the same system.

6. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 6 RAID 1  RAID 1 (mirroring): Data duplicated on second hard disk Offer redundancy Equivalent of one disk space lost for redundancy Only on 2 disks Support one disk failure controller

7. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 7  RAID 10 (stripping+ mirroring): Aggregation of several mirrors Offer redundancy Offer performance Half of physical space lost for duplication Even amount of disk required (4 minimum) Support one disk failure per mirror RAID 10 controller

8. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 8 RAID 5 controller  RAID 5 (stripping with parity): Data stripped on all disks Redundancy done by parity (XOR logical operator) Parity distributed on all disks Equivalent of one disk space is used for parity storage (1/n disk lost) 3 disks minimum, maximum given by controller Support one disk failure

9. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 9 RAID 6 – Triple Mirror  RAID 6-TM: Data mirrored on 3 disks Up to 2 disks lost Equivalent of 2 disks space used redundancy 3 disks minimum and maximum controller

10. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 10 RAID 6 – Double Parity  RAID 6 (stripping with duplicated parity): Data stripped on all disks Redundancy done by parity (XOR logical operator) Parity splitted and duplicated on all disks alternatively Equivalent of 2 disks space is used for parity storage (2/n disk lost) 4 disks minimum, maximum given by controller Support 2 disk failures

11. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 11 Non exhaustive list of «exotic / obsolete» RAID levels  RAID 0+1: A mirror of 2 RAID 0  RAID 1E:A RAID 0 where stripes are written twice and distributed across several disks = RAID1 on odd amount of disks.  RAID 3: RAID 5 where a single disk is dedicated to parity storage  RAID 5E, 5EE: Specific from LSI  RAID 7: RAID 0 using concatenation mode (with hdd of different sizes)  RAID 50: stripping of several RAID5  RAID 60: stripping of several RAID6  …

12. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 12 Expansion / Migration  Expansion: Possibility to expand size of RAID array by adding a disk. e.g. Expand a RAID5 with a new disk.  Migration: Possibility to change RAID level, eventually by adding disk. e.g. Migrate from RAID 1 to RAID 0 (still 2 disks). Always backup data as precaution but operation doesn’t impact data nor access to them. Some controllers offer to migrate ‘ONLINE’

13. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 13 RAID Signature – COD (Conf. On Disk)  RAID configuration is always written on disks.  Signature is around 700 MB big.  Today, most of RAID controllers doesn’t contain any configuration to avoid configuration mismatch. Some old controllers (LSI SCSI) stored RAID configuration, so be careful on RAID card swap !  Plug controller on server without any disk connected  Start server and « Clear configuration », stop server  Replug disk and start server, controller will load configuration automatically

14. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 14 RAID and operating system RAID ControllerOperating System N/AFiles N/APartitions Logical DrivePhysical Drive ArrayN/A Physical DisksN/A

15. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 15 Size of Physical Drive under Operating System RAID 1 Example two HDD of 300GB in RAID 1 will provide a size of less than 286GB under OS. 300.000.000 / 1024 / 1024 = 286,102 GB 286,102 – COD (≈ 700MB) = 285,402 GB COD 300 GB

16. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 16 Limitations on disk size (Windows)  A disk signed as ‘MBR’ type is limited to 2 TB.  A disk where Windows is installed is always ‘MBR’ type.  The only way to access more than 2 TB is to create a 2nd LD and convert it as ‘GPT’ Note: ‘GPT’ is available since Windows Server 2003 SP1 or more. More information on the following link : http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/4b35160a-4e27-4258-9e8b- e2088f8a757a1033.mspx

17. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 17 Status: Online or Unconfigured Disk “ONLINE”: ONLINE disk is a physical disk used or integrated in an Array. If all disks of an array are ONLINE, array status is ONLINE or OPTIMAL. Disk “READY or UNCONFIGURED”: Physical disk not used by the controller. Can be removed without impact controller READY or UNCONFIGURED ONLINE Array OPTIMAL or ONLINE ONLINE

18. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 18 controller DEAD or FAILED (not responding) ONLINE Status: Offline / Dead or Failed Disk “OFFLINE or FAILED”: Such disk is still in the array but inactive. The array is now DEGRADED or CRITICAL. It can be a minor error or a status manually forced by administrator. REBUILD required to reintegrate the disk in the array. Disk “DEAD or FAILED – NOT RESPONDING”: Like the OFFLINE status but means this is an hardware failure regarding the detection of the disk controller OFFLINE or FAILED ONLINE Array A0 DEGRADED or CRITICAL

19. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 19 controller DEAD or FAILED (not responding) DEAD or FAILED (not responding) ONLINE Status: Offline / Dead or Failed Array “OFFLINE”: All disks are OFFLINE. All data could be lost, but you can try to force all disks in ONLINE to retrieve the original configuration and data. Array “FAILED”: Two or more disks are OFFLINE but not all disks of the array. All the data could be lost, but you can try to force disk in ONLINE to retrieve the original configuration and data. controller OFFLINE or FAILED OFFLINE or FAILED OFFLINE or FAILED Array A0 OFFLINE or FAILED

20. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 20 controller REBUILD Segment 1 duplicated Segment 2 duplicated Segment 3 duplicated Segment 4 duplicated Array Disk FAILED or OFFLINE or DEAD Status: Hot Spare & Rebuild Disk “Hot Spare”: Hot spare disk is a standby disk ready to replace a failing (Offline or Dead) drive automatically This disk is not used until a failure occurs. After the rebuild, this disk is part of the array controller HOT SPARE FAILURE Array

21. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 21 Initialization Preparing a physical drive is called : format. Preparing a logical drive is called: initialisation. Initialisation will erase all sectors of logical drive. Two modes exists: Full Initialisation: all blocks of logical drive are erased, longer but safer Quick Initialisation: only first blocks of logical drive are erased and remaining block will be erased in background, shorter.

22. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 22 Patrol Read / Media Patrol  In order to detect bad sector independently of normal I/O activity, some controllers offer sector verification in background when system is idle.  According to controller, this feature is called “Patrol read” or “Media Patrol”  It can be done on non RAID drives (JBOD, Spare) and HDD in RAID.  If bad sector is detected, controller will notify of error  If HDD is not in RAID, data recovery cannot be applied.

23. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 23 Consistency Check Consistency Check is insuring that data are readable and redundant It applies on logical drive level with RAID level offering redundancy. It is a preventive maintenance task to be scheduled monthly. In case of inconsistency (ex: bad sector), the sector is dynamically remapped using HDD spare sectors and date are recovered from rest of RAID. Example here with 36GB RAID1 made of 2 x 15kRPM SAS disk linked to LSI 8408E.

24. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 24 Performance 2 families: 1.« Software » = Disk Controller + Software Software part is done by ROM BIOS and driver. Workload is on server CPU. No memory cache, nor BBU. It is also known as « HostRAID » Solution integrated on motherboard so cheapest solution 2.« Hardware » = Disk Controller + RAID Engine Dedicated controller, no CPU load. Memory cache / BBU Solution on daughter PCI card SouthBridge HDD PCI SouthBridge Internal bus PCI Disk controller Disk Controller HDD RAID Engine

25. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 25 Cache memory In order to optimise physical access to hard disk, some RAID controllers offer cache memory (option or on board) Cache Memory is always used for read access. Cache Memory may be used for write access: For write access, two mode exists: Write through= write cache disabled Write back = write enabled Write back is risky because data are not immediately written on disk. If power failure occurs, data may be lost.

26. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 26 BBU Battery Back Up Unit (BBU) option is designed to add fault tolerance against power failure. The BBU powers the memory until electricity comes back When BBU is present, write cache can be set to Write Back During maintenance operation, make sure to unplug battery before memory removal Ex1: LSI SecuRAID321Ex2: Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 PCI

27. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 27 Performance vs. RAID Levels and technology MB/sec RAID 0RAID 5

28. NEC Computers SAS - Confidential - Oct 2008 - RAID General Concept 28 Questions ?