RAID levels for Windows environments

Today, demand for low-cost arrays is pushing RAID technology downward from the enterprise level, through workgroups and departments, and even to SMB and small office/home office (SOHO) applications.

RAID technology is at its best when you're not aware of it doing its job -- for example, if a disk drive fails and the only way you know of it is when you receive an alert. Given the large-capacity low-cost disk drives in use today, and availability of low-cost RAID adapter cards and storage systems, RAID is as relevant today as it was 20 years ago.

RAID can be implemented in firmware on hardware devices, or via software in operating systems, volume managers, virtualization appliances and applications. The different levels of RAID protection indicate options for data protection, availability and performance while reducing the number of disk drives needed.

The table below shows the eight RAID levels, their associated characteristics and the types of applications they c

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an best benefit. Windows administrators may find themselves using differing RAID levels in your environment for different applications with different performance and availability needs. For instance, transaction data and other applications requiring high performance may be placed on RAID 0+1; RAID 1 will tend to be used for read-intensive data requiring high availability; and reference data may be placed on RAID-5, where it can be combined with write cache to offset write-penalty performance.

[TABLE]

Considerations with regard to RAID for Windows-based environments include:

There are many RAID packaging options, including storage systems, controller cards or host-server based RAID adapters. Vendors of RAID adapter cards include Adaptec, AMCC, ATTO, HP and LSI, but there are many other OEMs.

This is the first in a series of articles that take a look at protecting and securing data for Windows environments.

About the author: Greg Schulz is founder and senior analyst of the StorageIO Group, an independent storage analyst firm, and author of the book Resilient Storage Networks, published by Elsevier. Chapter 12 of the book covers RAID in depth. Chapter 2, which covers data storage fundamentals is available for download.

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