HP Xw4600 HP Workstations for Linux - User Guide - Page 21

5 Software RAID in HP Linux workstations Introduction This chapter provides an summary of software RAID considerations for HP workstations running the Linux operating system. In addition references to procedures on configuring software RAID are also provided in this chapter. NOTE: While BIOS messages might refer to hardware RAID, only SAS hardware RAID is supported by HP Linux workstations. See Installing and configuring SAS hardware RAID on page 19 the for information about configuring hardware RAID. Software RAID considerations The Linux kernel offers integrated software RAID without the need for additional hardware disk controllers or kernel patches. All that is required are multiple hard disks and a small amount of setup. Unlike most hardware RAID solutions, software RAID can be used with all types of disk technologies, including SATA, SAS, SCSI and solid state drives. Compared to hardware-based RAID, software RAID has disadvantages in managing the disks, breaking up data as necessary, and managing parity data. The CPU must assume some extra loading. It has been found that heavily disk-intensive workloads result in roughly double the CPU overhead (for example, from 15% to 30%) when software RAID is in use. For most applications, this overhead is easily handled by excess headroom in the processors. But for some applications where disk and CPU performance are very well balanced and already near-bottleneck levels, this additional CPU overhead can become troublesome. Hardware RAID offers advantages because of its large hardware cache and the capability for better scheduling of operations in parallel. However, software RAID offers more flexibility for disk and disk controller setup. Additionally, hardware RAID requires that a failed RAID controller must be replaced with an identical model to avoid data loss, whereas software RAID imposes no such requirements. Some software RAID schemes offer data protection through mirroring (copying the data to multiple disks in case one fails) or parity data (checksums that allow error detection and limited rebuilding of data in case of a failure), but all software RAID solutions on HP workstations require the shutdown of the system so that the failed drive can be replaced before redundancy can be restored. The replacement of failed drives in software RAID requires only a minimum amount of work. Performance considerations Disk I/O bandwidth is typically limited by the system bus speeds, the disk controller, and the disks themselves. The balance of these hardware limitations, as affected by the software configuration, determines where the real bottleneck is in the system. Several RAID levels offer improved performance relative to a standalone disk. If the disk throughput is lessened by a single disk controller, there is probably little you can do with RAID to improve the performance without adding another controller. On the other hand, if the raw disk performance is the bottleneck, a tuned software RAID solution can dramatically improve the throughput. The slower the disk is relative to the rest of the system, the better RAID performance will scale, because the slowest piece of the performance pipeline is being directly addressed by moving to RAID. ENWW Introduction 17