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Raid

The document discusses the use of Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) to improve disk performance and reliability through striping and redundancy. It outlines various RAID levels, including RAID 0 (non-redundant), RAID 1 (mirrored), and RAID 5 (distributed parity), highlighting their trade-offs in terms of performance and data protection. Additionally, it addresses the complexities of managing multiple disks and the challenges associated with booting from RAID configurations.

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Raid

The document discusses the use of Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) to improve disk performance and reliability through striping and redundancy. It outlines various RAID levels, including RAID 0 (non-redundant), RAID 1 (mirrored), and RAID 5 (distributed parity), highlighting their trade-offs in terms of performance and data protection. Additionally, it addresses the complexities of managing multiple disks and the challenges associated with booting from RAID configurations.

Uploaded by

nafyjabesa1
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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CSE 451: Operating Systems

Winter 2013

Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks


(RAID)
and OS structure

Gary Kimura
The challenge
• Disk transfer rates are improving, but much less fast
than CPU performance
• We can use multiple disks to improve performance
– by striping files across multiple disks (placing parts of each
file on a different disk), we can use parallel I/O to improve
access time
• Striping reduces reliability
– 100 disks have 1/100th the MTBF (mean time between
failures) of one disk
• So, we need striping for performance, but we need
something to help with reliability / availability
• To improve reliability, we can add redundant data to
the disks, in addition to striping
2
RAID
• A RAID is a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
• Disks are small (physically) and cheap, so it’s easy to
put lots of disks (10s to 100s) in one box for
increased storage, performance, and availability
• Data plus some redundant information is striped
across the disks in some way
• How striping is done is key to performance and
reliability

3
Some RAID tradeoffs
• Granularity
– fine-grained: stripe each file over all disks
• high throughput for the file
• limits transfer to 1 file at a time
– coarse-grained: stripe each file over only a few disks
• limits throughput for 1 file
• allows concurrent access to multiple files
• Redundancy
– uniformly distribute redundancy information on disks
• avoids load-balancing problems
– concentrate redundancy information on a small number of
disks
• partition the disks into data disks and redundancy disks

4
RAID Level 0
• RAID Level 0 is a non-redundant disk array
• Files are striped across disks, no redundant info
• High read throughput
• Best write throughput (no redundant info to write)
• Any disk failure results in data loss; sometimes a file,
sometimes the entire volume

5
RAID Level 1
• RAID Level 1 is mirrored disks
• Files are striped across (half) the disks
• Data is written to multiple (two) places – data disks
and mirror disks
• On failure, just use the surviving disk(s)
• Factor of N (2x) space expansion

data disks mirror copies

6
RAID Levels 2, 3, and 4
• RAID levels 2, 3, and 4 use ECC (error correcting
code) or parity disks
– E.g., each byte on the parity disk is a parity function of the
corresponding bytes on all the other disks
• A read accesses all the data disks
• A write accesses all the data disks plus the parity
disk
• On disk failure, read the remaining disks plus the
parity disk to compute the missing data
data disks parity disk

7
Refresher: What’s parity?

1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1

• To each byte, add a bit set so that the total number of


1’s is even
• Any single missing bit can be reconstructed
• (Why does memory parity not work quite this way?)

8
RAID Level 5
• RAID Level 5 uses block interleaved distributed parity
• Like parity scheme, but distribute the parity info (as
well as data) over all disks
– for each block, one disk holds the parity, and the other disks
hold the data
• Significantly better performance
– parity disk is not a hot spot
data & parity drives

0 1 2 3 PO
File Block
5 6 7 P1 4 Numbers

10 11 P2 8 9

9
Management
• Multiple spindles complicates things
– Visible to: Apps? File system?
– Allocation of space (per user on a “file server”)
– SANs
– Differing disk sizes
• Partitions!
– Logical division of spindle into blocks
– Assemble volumes from partitions

10
OS and Hardware Layering
• Who needs to know?
Operating System
– FS: probably not
File System

Fault Tolerance

Volume Manager

Device Driver

Disk Controller

Disk 0 Disk 1 Disk 2

11
OS and Hardware Layering
• Why put FT into hardware?
– Speed
– Simplicity of OS Operating System
• Why not?
– Fixes File System
– CvI data
Volume Manager

Device Driver

Disk Controller w/ FT

Disk 0 Disk 1 Disk 2

12
One tiny problem with RAID and multiple
spindles…
• How do you boot?
– ROM on motherboard doesn’t have a lot of room for logic
– Boot zone on disk doesn’t have a lot of room for logic (and
needs to be replicated, striped, etc.)
– Put partition info into “well-known place”
– Put RAID info into “well-known place”
– Still… too complicated
• “Real systems”…
– Don’t boot from multi-partition volumes
– Boot from RAID 0, at most RAID 1 (simple failover)

13

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