Performance monitoring and tuning 465

Performance guidelines

Combining mirroring and striping

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Mirroring and striping can be used together to achieve a significant improvement in performance when there are multiple I/O streams.

Striping provides better throughput because parallel I/O streams can operate concurrently on separate devices. Serial access is optimized when I/O exactly fits across all stripe units in one stripe.

Because mirroring is generally used to protect against loss of data due to disk failures, it is often applied to write-intensive workloads which degrades throughput. In such cases, combining mirroring with striping delivers both high availability and increased throughput.

A mirrored-stripe volume may be created by striping half of the available disks to form one striped data plex, and striping the remaining disks to form the other striped data plex in the mirror. This is often the best way to configure a set of disks for optimal performance with reasonable reliability. However, the failure of a single disk in one of the plexes makes the entire plex unavailable.

Alternatively, you can arrange equal numbers of disks into separate mirror volumes, and then create a striped plex across these mirror volumes to form a striped-mirror volume (see Mirroring plus striping (striped-mirror,RAID-1+0 or RAID-10) on page 43). The failure of a single disk in a mirror does not take the disks in the other mirrors out of use. A striped-mirror layout is preferred over a mirrored-stripe layout for large volumes or large numbers of disks.

RAID-5

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RAID-5 offers many of the advantages of combined mirroring and striping, but requires less disk space. RAID-5 read performance is similar to that of striping and RAID-5 parity offers redundancy similar to mirroring. Disadvantages of RAID-5 include relatively slow write performance.

RAID-5 is not usually seen as a way of improving throughput performance except in cases where the access patterns of applications show a high ratio of reads to writes.