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RAID5 vs RAID10 speed benchmark?



 
 
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  #11  
Old June 3rd 04, 07:07 AM
Robert Wessel
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"Bill Todd" wrote in message ...
They may be smart enough to avoid a copy: if you lay out the RAID-10
material suavely (leaving an unused parity block in each copy's stripe,
since space efficiency is not paramount for the temporary mirrored part of
the storage) and have an explicit per-stripe map (which you probably want
anyway if you're going to allow the division between RAID-10 and RAID-5
space to vary dynamically), you can just leave one copy of the data in place
and only write the parity when you convert it to RAID-5.

Assuming that none of the RAID-10 data is still cached when the conversion
is performed, this results in N reads and one write, rather than the N reads
and N+1 writes a copy would require (this can be further optimized by
creating parity in memory as each RAID-10 disk segment is evicted from the
cache, avoiding the reads at the cost of a single chunk of cache which
itself could be staged to disk - using the 'spare' disk in the RAID-10
stripe - if space got tight; you'd have to model this to decide exactly what
strategy was best). The stripe map likely is maintained in stable RAM and
updated on disk only occasionally: these aren't low-end arrays. And
conversion doesn't necessarily occur that often: the only reason you *ever*
need to move data from RAID-10 to RAID-5 storage is because you're getting
tight on overall space and need the resulting near-factor-of-2 compression -
and for many update-intensive workloads the net accumulation of data is
relatively slow (if the workload is not update-intensive, you might be
better off just using vanilla-flavored RAID-5 anyway, fronted by a stable
cache if small-chunk extension of existing data is common to consolidate it
into larger writes).



While that neatly avoids much of the work in the RAID10-RAID5
conversion, Aren't you screwed when you need to go the other way?
Unless you save that for a out-of-line process as well, presumably
driven by some accumulated usage statistics (stripe X gets heavy
updates, migrate it to RAID10).

Stripe level HSM, IOW?
  #12  
Old June 3rd 04, 04:00 PM
Bill Todd
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"Robert Wessel" wrote in message
om...

....

While that neatly avoids much of the work in the RAID10-RAID5
conversion, Aren't you screwed when you need to go the other way?
Unless you save that for a out-of-line process as well, presumably
driven by some accumulated usage statistics (stripe X gets heavy
updates, migrate it to RAID10).


My (now somewhat vague) recollection is that they maintain usage stats on
the stripes - that's how they determine what to move to RAID-5 when space
starts to get tight. And there's at least somewhat less movement in the
reverse direction: typical usage tends to be create, use heavily, use
lightly, then delete (and for that matter update-in-place operations are
themselves usually the exception rather than the rule, so perhaps the *most*
typical usage - save for actively-updated databases - is create, then read
one or more times, then delete).


Stripe level HSM, IOW?


Yup.

- bill



  #15  
Old June 6th 04, 01:41 AM
perfnerd
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(Robert Wessel) wrote in message . com...
(perfnerd) wrote in message . com...

You don't migrate from RAID5 to RAID10. The read performance for
RAID5 and RAID10 is similar since the data is automatically striped.
So, there is no need to migrate for read performance. Any time a
block gets written, you just write it in RAID10, and let the migration
algorithms handle the movement back to RAID5.



Bill and I were discussing a slightly different arrangement, where
stripes are migrated between RAID5 and RAID10 configurations as
appropriate. The earlier discussion involved a separate RAID10 area
where updates were queued until they could be migrated to main RAID5
area, presumably during a less busy time.


That was my point. When data is written, you write in in RAID10. As
the data ages and there is pressure on the disk usage then you start
migrating from RAID10 to RAID5. You do it during spare cycles. Once
in RAID5 there is no need to from RAID5 to RAID10, read performance
should be the same or better in RAID5 as the data is striped over more
spindles in RAID5.

If an existing block is re-written, you write it in RAID10 and mark
the old block as out-of-date. The invalid block is still used for
data recovery purposes, just not data access. Then you let a
housekeeping process either convert the remaining blocks in the RAID5
checksum block back to RAID10, recalculate the remaing blocks without
the updated data, or reincorporate the new block into the RAID5
checksum block. Pick your rule, or come up with heuristics to choose
one. Scheduling a conversion to RAID10 for the remaining blocks is
probably simplest as you can then let the 10to5 migration process
handle the decision of when to migrate back to RAID5.
 




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