Re: Opinions on Raid

Joe Uhl wrote:
> We have been running Postgres on a 2U server with 2 disks configured in
> raid 1 for the os and logs and 4 disks configured in raid 10 for the
> data. I have since been told raid 5 would have been a better option
> given our usage of Dell equipment and the way they handle raid 10. I
> have just a few general questions about raid with respect to Postgres:
>
> [1] What is the performance penalty of software raid over hardware raid?
> Is it truly significant? We will be working with 100s of GB to 1-2 TB
> of data eventually.

this depends a lot on the raidcontroller (whether it has or not BBWC for
example) - for some use-cases softwareraid is actually faster(especially
for seq-io tests).

>
> [2] How do people on this list monitor their hardware raid? Thus far we
> have used Dell and the only way to easily monitor disk status is to use
> their openmanage application. Do other controllers offer easier means
> of monitoring individual disks in a raid configuration? It seems one
> advantage software raid has is the ease of monitoring.

well the answer to that question depends on what you are using for your
network monitoring as a whole as well as your Platform of choice. If you
use say nagios and Linux it makes sense to use a nagios plugin (we do
that here with a unified check script that checks everything from
LSI-MPT based raid cards, over IBMs ServeRAID, HPs Smartarray,LSI
MegaRAID cards and also Linux/Solaris Software RAID).
If you are using another monitoring solution(OpenView, IBM
Directory,...) your solution might look different.

Stefan