Question

Question 1

A local online trading company, Bursa Malaysia (BSKL) is running out of capacity and performance with the current storage system. BSKL has decided to own a RAID system at a reasonable cost to increase the speed, capacity, availability and scalability of the trading activities.

(a) Identify any FIVE (5) RAID systems that might be suitable for BSKL. (Refer to the BSKL website to understand the online activities that have been actively running.)

[10 marks]

Answer 1

1) There are typically following RAID systems :

i) RAID 0

ii) RAID 1

ii) RAID 2

ii) RAID 3

ii) RAID 4

ii) RAID 5

ii) RAID 6

All above RAID systems have different functionality and features.

If you look into BSKL website , you will figure out that It is involved in many activities but I am writing down few activities that It is involved in.

1) Live Trading

2) Historic Data

3) Charts

4) Data Analysis

Based on above activities I would suggest below written RAID systems .

1) RAID 0 System :

RAID 0 system splits data evenly across two drives so data accessing is very fast . RAID 0 is normally used to increase performance. Since BKSL is involved in live trading , it is needed to update the data very quick so RAID 0 would be useful.

2) RAID 1 System :

Since it's a live trading website , a fault in any disk could let the complete system down and that would not be good. So RAID 1 is good because it creates several mirror copies of disk. Even if one disk got crashed or becomes faulty , system would not go down. It increases performance also because any read request could be handled by any disk.

3) RAID 4 System :

RAID 4 system implement block level stripping with a dedicated parity disk that is why RAID 4 provides good performance over random reads.

4) RAID 6 System :

RAID 6 extends RAID 5 by adding another parity block . It uses two parity block which are distributed across all member disks. RAID 6 system can continue execute read and write requests to all of RAID array's virtual disk in presence of two concurrent disk failure. So even if two disks are failed , RAID 6 system can serve read and write requests continuously.

5) RAID 60 System :

RAID 60 system is a nested RAID system that is combination of RAID 0 and RAID 6 system that provides the features of both RAID 0 and RAID 6 systems. RAID 60 system will provide very good performance and ability to fault tolerance.