Investing in a RAID

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, and often requires a separate controller card for management. The primary purpose of a RAID is to combine several physical devices into a single logical unit for the sake of redundancy and performance.

This is especially relevant to our interests. Carnegie Mellon University published a study in 2007 on hard drive failure rates. They found that hard drives fail at about 3 percent per year. Furthermore, they found that drive type and interface contributed little to disk longevity, and that hard drives do not reflect a tendency to fail early, as was commonly accepted. These findings were largely corroborated by a parallel study released the same year by Google.

What does this mean? For our purposes in building a highly-available server, it means hard drives should be looked at with great disdain. Larger databases will depend on tens or hundreds of hard drives in order to represent several terabytes of data. With a 3 percent failure rate per year, a 100-drive array would lose roughly nine devices after three years.

This is the primary reason that all of our calculations regarding disk devices automatically assume a 10 percent excess inventory allotment. If a drive fails, we need an immediate replacement. Vendors are not always capable of delivering a new drive quickly enough. Having a spare on hand, ideally at the hosting facility or in the server itself, helps ensure continuous uptime.

So how does RAID figure into this scenario? If we hosted our database on several bare hard drives, knowing that around 10 percent of these drives will fail in three years, outages would be inevitable. What we want is an abstraction layer, one that can present any amount of hard drives as a single whole, keeping reserves for drive errors, handling checksums for integrity, and mirroring for redundancy.

RAID provides all of that in several convenient configurations. Good controller cards often include copious amounts of cache and other management capabilities. Instead of manually assigning dozens of drives, split them into several usable array allocations that reflect much lower operational risk.

Knowing all of this, databases have special needs when it comes to RAID and the performance characteristics associated with each RAID type. Now we will explore the selection criteria for our database, and how to simplify the process.

Getting ready

That was a long introduction, wasn't it? Well, we also strongly suggest taking a look at the Having enough IOPS and Sizing storage recipes before continuing. Make sure the hardware spreadsheet has a drive count for the type of drives going into the server we're designing. If we're using PCIe instead of standard SSD drives, this section can be skipped.

How to do it...

Only a few RAID levels matter in a database context. Perform these steps to decide which one is right for this server:

If this is an OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) database primarily for handling very high speed queries, use RAID level 1+0
If this is a non-critical development or staging system, use RAID level 5
If this is a non-critical OLAP (Online Analytic Processing) reporting system, use RAID level 5
If this is a critical OLAP reporting system, use RAID level 6
If this is a long-term storage OLAP warehouse, use RAID level 6

How it works...

We made a lot of snap decisions here. There are quite a few RAID levels that we simply ignored, so there should be some discussion regarding the reasoning we used.

Let's begin with RAID level 0. Level 0 stripes data across all disks at once. It's certainly convenient, but a single drive failure will lose all stored information in the array. What about RAID level 1? Level 1 acts as a full mirror of all data stored. For every set of drives, a second set of drives has an exact copy. If a drive fails in one set, the second set is still available. However, if that set also experiences any failure, all data is lost.

When we talk about RAID 1+0, we actually combine the mirroring capability of RAID 1 with the striping of RAID 0. How? Take a look at the following diagram for six disks:

In this RAID 1+0, we have three sets, each consisting of two disks. Each of the two disks mirror each other, and the data is striped across all three sets. We could lose a disk from each set and still have all of our data. We only have a problem if we lose two disks from the same set, since they mirror each other. Overall, this is the most robust RAID level available, and the most commonly used for OLTP systems.

RAID level 5 and 6 take a different approach. Again, let's look at six drives and see a very simplified view of how RAID 5 would operate in that situation:

The solid line shows that the data is spread across all six drives. The dotted line is the parity information. If a drive fails and the block can't be read directly from the necessary location, a RAID 5 will use the remaining parity information from all drives to reconstruct the missing data. The only real difference between a RAID 5 and a RAID 6 is that a RAID 6 contains a second parity line, so up to two drives can fail before the array begins operating in a degraded manner.

Using a RAID 5 or 6 offers more protection than a RAID 0, with less cost than a RAID 1+0, which requires double the amount of desired space. We selected these for non-critical OLAP systems because they usually need space over performance, and are not as sensitive to immediate availability pressures as an OLTP system.

There's more...

We mentioned controller cards earlier, and noted that they also offer on-board cache. RAID has been around for a long time, and though disks are getting much larger, they haven't experienced an equivalent increase in speed. In scenarios that use RAID 5 or 6, writes can also be slowed since each write must be committed to several devices simultaneously in the form of parity.

To combat this, RAID controllers allow configuration of the cache itself, to buffer writes in favor of reads, or vice versa. Don't be afraid to adjust this and run tests to determine the best cache mix. If everything else fails, start with a 100 percent for writes, as they are the most in need of caching. Keep a close eye on write performance, and give it priority. Generally, the OS cache does a better job of caching reads, and has much more memory available to do so.