HP "Autoraid" Performance

From: <alcesteatxmissiondot_at_com.or.net>
Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2004 08:36:43 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <bvidqr$kso$2@terabinaries.xmission.com>

Recently got an HP VA 7110 Disk Array with ten disks to run a development database on. This time around, I'm going with the "stripe and mirror everything" philosophy. When the HP tech was showing me the system, I was given the choice between Raid 1+0 and "Autoraid."

At first I assumed this was a funny name for RAID 5, but it turns out that no, it was more than that. It seems to be a system that uses either a raid 1+0 or a raid 5 with an additional parity area, depending on the disk access characteristics.

Here's a paper that talks about it...not sure how current the information is:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ssp/papers/Voigt1998.pdf

The information I can find touts the system's performance over RAID 5, but I'm not finding any data that compares it for OLTP databases against a striped and mirrored configuration.

Anyone used this or looked at it? What do you think?

Jer Smith Received on Sun Feb 01 2004 - 02:36:43 CST