Configuration Planning Overview

When planning a configuration, the main point to keep in mind is that for any given application there are trade-offs in performance, availability, and hardware costs. Experimenting with the different variables is necessary to figure out what works best for your configuration.

What are the performance trade-offs?

Striping generally has the best performance, but it offers no data protection. For write intensive applications, mirroring generally has better performance than RAID 5 volumes.

What are the availability trade-offs?

RAID 1 (mirror) volumes and RAID 5 volumes both increase data availability, but they both generally have lower performance, especially for write operations. Creating RAID 1 volumes does improve random read performance.

What are the hardware cost trade-offs?

RAID 5 volumes have a lower hardware cost than creating RAID 1 volumes. Both striped volumes and concatenated volumes have no additional hardware cost.