Infortrend RAID Controller Manual

Chapter
3
RAID Planning
3.1 Considerations
After you understand the basic ideas behind a RAID system, you may
still be wondering about how to begin. Here are the answers to some
questions that may help you through the decision making.
1. How many physical drives do you have?
When initially creating the drive groups, you should know
how many drives you have in drive chassis or cabinet.
2. How many drives would you like to appear to the
host computer?
It must be decided what capacity will be included in a logical
configuration of drives. A logical configuration of drives will
appear to the host as a single capacity volume.
3. What kind of host application?
The frequency of read/write activities can vary from one host
application to another. The application can be a SQL server,
Oracle server, Informix, or other data base server of a
transaction-based nature. Applications like video playback
and video post-production editing require read/writes of huge
files in a sequential order.
The RAID level setting depends on what is the most important
for a given application – capacity, availability, or performance.
Before creating your RAID, you need to choose an optimization
scheme .and optimize the controller for your application.
Figure 3 - 1 Optimization Process
Main Menu
View and Edit
Configuration
Parameters
Reset Controller
Caching
Parameters
Optimization
RAID Planning 3-1