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Boosting Your RAID Controller’s Storage Performance

Armed with the proper guidance, data center administrators can squeeze more performance from their RAID controllers. Storage expert Henry Newman discusses the key points: Tuning RAID controllers is not as difficult as some vendors would have you believe; there’s no need for professional services to get the job done. Many of the parameters reside around […]

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thumbnail Henry Newman
Henry Newman
Aug 24, 2010
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Armed with the proper guidance, data center administrators can squeeze more performance from their RAID controllers. Storage expert Henry Newman discusses the key points:

Tuning RAID controllers is not as difficult as some vendors would have you believe; there’s no need for professional services to get the job done.

Many of the parameters reside around the cache and cache usage, along with the obvious tunable parameters for the RAID LUNs. This article isn’t about tuning specific RAID controllers; for that, you will need to spend some time reading the documentation, but hopefully by reading this you will be able to consider the parameters in context with the I/O of the whole system. Each vendor has its own nomenclature for variable names and what they mean. As there is no standard set of definitions, I have chosen my own, which you should be able to apply to a specific vendor. The areas that need to be considered are: LUN creation and RAID level, and cache tuning and configuration.

Figuring out what RAID levels to use has been pretty well covered (see RAID Storage Levels Explained), so we’ll stick to the subject of RAID tunables here. If you configure RAID to optimize your system, whether that be a RAID controller card on your PC or a high-end mission-critical enterprise RAID array, you should have a good understanding of what to consider after reading this article.

We’ll start by considering what type of RAID controller you have. Today they can be broken down into three categories:

Read the rest at Enterprise Storage Forum.

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thumbnail Henry Newman

Henry Newman has been a contributor to TechnologyAdvice websites for more than 20 years. His career in high-performance computing, storage and security dates to the early 1980s, when Cray was the name of a supercomputing company rather than an entry in Urban Dictionary. After nearly four decades of architecting IT systems, he recently retired as CTO of a storage company’s Federal group, but he rather quickly lost a bet that he wouldn't be able to stay retired by taking a consulting gig in his first month of retirement.

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