RAID Type Considerations for Large Capacity Drives for Unified Platforms

Introduction This note serves to clearly articulate the considerations regarding RAID configuration recommendations for the VNX and CX4/NS platforms for the large capacity drives. The discussion below will illustrate the reliability benefits of RAID 6, and the cost/performance benefits of RAID 5. VNX provides flexibility in terms of the RAID configurations offered: RAID 1/0 (mirroring), RAID 5 (single parity RAID), RAID 6 (double parity RAID). The choice of RAID type has implications in the areas of reliability, performance, and efficiency (capacity overhead) and should be understood when planning a VNX implementation. EMC has maintained a discretionary recommendation that drives of 1TB or greater should be configured with RAID 6 since SATA drives of this size were first made available. This is to minimize the risk of a double drive failure during the extended rebuild times associated with these larger capacity/lower performance drives. This recommendation also applies for NL-SAS drives on VNX, and starting with the VNX, users will be strongly encouraged to use RAID 6 when creating pools containing drives 1 TB or larger, to reinforce this discretionary recommendation. This is only a recommendation, however; users they will be allowed to configure their pools as RAID 5 or RAID 1/0 if they prefer. For homogeneous (single drive type) pools, as well as traditional RAID Groups (which are, by definition, homogeneous), best practice guidelines of using RAID 6 for pools containing 1 TB or larger drives should be very clear for users. For heterogeneous pools, with a mix of drive types and drive capacities, pool configuration guidelines are a bit less straightforward since best practices vary according to drive type and capacity, yet virtual pools must be configured with a single RAID type (we will be looking at providing a way to define the RAID type at the tier level, rather than the pool level, in a future release). The discussion below is intended to help with configuration-planning for heterogeneous pools, by outlining the considerations and trade-offs when considering RAID 5 versus RAID 6. For the discussion below, we will assume the default virtual pool configurations of 4+1 RAID 5 or 6+2 RAID 6. Reliability / Availability Advantage to RAID 6 Assuming a Mean Time Before Part Replaced (MTBPR) of 750, 000 hours (typical for 2 TB SATA / NL-SAS drives) for a 4+1 RAID 5 configuration compared to a 6+2 RAID 6 configuration, the Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) for the complete loss of a RAID group is 453 years for the RAID 5 configuration and 52 M years for the RAID 6 configuration. Put another way, for RAID 5 configurations the break rate is ~1 failures per year per 500 systems* for RAID 5 compared to 1 failure per year per 50M systems based on RAID 6. Note: the variability of the math for different configurations depends on number of drives per RAID group, time to replace the part and time to rebuild the RAID group and assuming there are no other software or hardware factors contributing to the failure and whether drives are configured in Pools which has a larger fault domain that customers must be aware of. Please refer to EMC CLARiiON Best Practices for Performance and Availability: Release 30.0 Firmware, in the section entitled Virtual Provisioning: thin and thick LUNs, for more info.
* Each System with 10 Classic RAID Groups

Performance Advantage to RAID 5 The general performance impact of RAID 6 versus RAID 5 is dependent upon the write workload on the system. A general rule of thumb is that the overall throughput of the random write performance of the system is reduced by 50%, due to RAID 6 requiring 6 physical I/Os per write compared to 4 physical I/Os per write for RAID 5. For instance, in a 100% write scenario a RAID 5 configuration that can deliver 1500 IOs per second would be able to deliver 1000 I/Os per second with RAID 6. In a more typical scenario of 20% write, the impact would be roughly a 10 percent throughput hit. Read performance is comparable for RAID 6 versus RAID 5. Capacity/Efficiency Slight advantage to RAID 5 Again assuming 4+1 and 6+2 RAID configurations and assuming 1 hot spare per 30 drives in both cases, there is a 5% delta for useable capacity for RAID5 (4+1) vs. RAID6 (6+2). This 5% capacity impact translates to 2-3% overall system cost increase to add the additional raw capacity required to support the comparable useable capacity with RAID 6. The table below provides an example, based on average CX4/NS4 system configurations for new system sales since FLARE R30 became available (capacity units are GB):
Flash Total Capacity CX4-120 CX4-240 CX4-480 CX4-960 258 402 768 1267 Delta b/t R5 & R6 13 20 38 63 Fibre Channel Total Capacity 12445 27586 41761 75113 Delta b/t R5 & R6 622 1379 2088 3756 SATA Total Capacity 17308 25578 46473 92643 Delta b/t R5 & R6 865 1279 2324 4632 Impact on total cost of system
3% 3% 2% 2%

Note: This data is based on the assumption that all drives ordered for a system were configured for pool usage.

If some of the drives were used in traditional RAID Groups instead, the impact on total cost of the system would decrease. Also, prices in this example were based on Average Street price of each of the 3 drive types.

General guidelines and key takeaways from these considerations: In summary, for homogenous pools (or RAID Groups), with 1 TB or larger drives, which are typically used for low performance applications specifically, always use RAID 6. For heterogeneous pools (where large capacity drives are used as a component in a tiered, high performance pool using FAST to manage the dynamic workload), the RAID selection should be driven by your customers preference: If the customer preference is to optimize for reliability, use RAID 6. If the customer preference is to optimize for performance and/or cost, use RAID 5.