Question

Exercise 1

A company is planning to reconfigure storage for their accounting application for high availability

Current configuration and challenges:

Application performs 15% random writes and 85% random reads

Currently deployed with five RAID 0 configuration

Each disk has an advertised formatted capacity of 200 GB

Total size of the accounting application's data is 730 GB which is unlikely to change over 6 months

Approaching end of financial year, buying even one disk is not possible

Task

Recommend a RAID level that the company can use to restructure their environment fulfilling their needs

Justify your choice based on cost, performance, and availability

Exercise 2

The same company is now planning to reconfigure storage for their database application for high availability

Current configuration and challenges

The application performs 40% writes and 60% reads

Currently deployed on a six disk RAID 0 configuration with advertised capacity of each disk being 200 GB

Size of the database is 900 GB and the amount of data is likely to increase by 30% over the next 6 months

It is a new financial year and the company has an increased budget

Task

Recommend a suitable RAID level to fulfill the company's needs

Estimate the cost of the new solution (200GB disk costs $1,000)

Justify your choice based on cost, performance, and availability

Answer 1

Here is the solution. Please do upvote thank you.

Exercise 1:

In systems with three or more drives (like in this case with 5 disks ), recommend that you set the system to RAID 5. This gives the user the best of both worlds: fast performance by striping data across all drives; data protection by dedicating a quarter of each drive to fault tolerance leaving three quarters of the system capacity available for data storage.

Exercise 2:

1. Recommend to Implement RAID 5.

2. No Additional Cost as the Company can implement RAID 5 with the existing ones .Effort wil be there to take back up of the data and reconfigured the disks as RAID5

3. No Additional Cost , performace will little less as compared to RAID 0 but not much and data avaiability is much more and RAID 5 provides much better fault tolerance than any other RAID options .

Total space you get from the array corresponds to S * (n-1), where S is the size of the smallest disk, and n is the number of disks.

******About RAID 5*******

Data is striped across a group of disk drives with distributed parity. Parity information is written to a different disk in the array for each stripe.

Redundancy
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Parity is distributed across the disks in the array. Data is regenerated in the event of a drive failure.

Performance
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High performance in small record, multiprocessing environments because there is no contention for the parity disk and read and write operations can be overlapped. No write bottlenecks as with RAID 4.

Drawbacks
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Distributed parity causes overhead on write operations. There is also overhead created when data is changed, because parity information must be located and then recalculated.