Technology Brief

Enterprise Hardware RAID and Software RAID

WHY CHOOSE ENTERPRISE HARDWARE RAID OVER SOFTWARE RAID ?

MANAGEABILITY
Hardware RAID is data protection and application acceleration technology delivered on PCI Express based
option cards with related firmware, drivers, utilities and management software. Enterprise hardware RAID To minimize storage total cost of ownership (TCO), hardware RAID solutions offer features
cards have onboard capabilities to perform parity generation and RAID recovery operations, as well as to install, tune, and modify data protection, capacity and performance parameters as
data, memory and bus management. Software RAID, a subset of the features delivered in hardware RAID, is business needs require.
usually delivered as part of an operating system and relies on system resources, processors, and memory. Enterprise hardware RAID solutions offer a consistent set of tools across machines in virtual
environments. Software RAID, because it is often part of a guest OS, may have very different
features and compatibilities from the other virtual machines (VMs) hosted on a given physical
DATA PROTECTION server. Different tools, management options, additional complexities.
Hardware RAID firmware resides on the dedicated option card and runs independently Enterprise hardware RAID features such as Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) for adding storage
of other system resources. Software RAID as part of the operating system (OS), running on the fly and RAID Level Migration (RLM), allow storage administrators to change the RAID
on system resources will lose access to data and consistency will be compromised any time data protection schemes in real time to meet changing service level requirements. Typically not
the OS is compromised, during a crash, blue screen or a system reset. available in software RAID.
Hardware RAID also has a number of spare drive features like the ability to assign a hot spare to Software RAID Hardware RAID
a specific volume, in addition to supporting globally available hot spares, thus adding another
Import RAID Configurations from Different Servers or RAID Controllers No Yes
layer of data availability.
Maintain Failed Drive History No Yes
RAID Levels 0/1/10/5 0/1/10/5/50/6/60
Software RAID Hardware RAID RAID Level Migration (RLM) No Yes
Copy Back Hot Spare No Yes Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) No Yes
Dedicated Hot Spare No Yes Drive Multipath Support No Yes
Firmware Base Code to Isolate RAID Protection from OS Crashes No, Driver Based Yes Revertible Hot Spare No Yes
Data Recovery from System-level OS Crashes, Panics and Blue Screens No Yes External Enclosure Support No Yes
Auto Resume after Power Fail Rebuild, CC, BGI RLM, OCE, Rebuild, CC, BGI SES No Yes
Battery Backup Onboard Cache Protection No Yes Monitor HDD Temperature No Yes
Encryption Services for SED HDDs No Yes Direct Attached LED No Yes
Onboard Cache Protection No Yes Consistent O/S Support Especially in Virtual Machines No Yes
Figure 1 Data Protection Features generally available in Hardware RAID Solutions not found in Software RAID Figure 2 Hardware RAID Management features not commonly found in Software RAID offerings.
 SCALABILITY APPLICATION ACCELERATION
Enterprise hardware RAID solutions offer many features to support the requirements Finally, enterprise hardware RAID offers significant additional capabilities in application
of larger data centers. Simply put enterprise hardware RAID scales. From the number of acceleration, especially for data I/O intensive environments like On Line Transaction
physical connections available for direct attachment to drives to the number of SAS expanders Processing (OLTP), ecommerce, web hosting and digital content. Enterprise hardware RAID
supported and the number of physical and virtual devices and hot spares, hardware RAID offers is designed to have a measureable impact on end user experience by optimizing I/O using
the opportunity to start small, but scale rapidly and smoothly when required. dedicated resources, not consuming the same processor, bus and memory resources that
applications are competing for, especially in cloud based, virtual environments. Hardware
RAID can support more complex I/O environments with greater queue depths and the ability
to handle variable stripe sizes for maximum I/O efficiency, and other important features noted
below.
Software RAID Hardware RAID Software RAID Hardware RAID
Max Number of Hot Spare Support 8 32 Outstanding I/Os Supported 16 1024
Max Device per Controller 8 up to 240 System Processors, Bus and Memory Consumed Yes No
Max PD for RAID Configuration 8 up to 240 Separate Dedicated Resources for RAID Calculations and Data Management No Yes
Max Disk Group per Controller 8 16 Variable Stripe Size for All VD 64K only Yes, up to 1MB
Max PD per Disk Group 8 32 Controller Read Ahead Cache Policy No Yes
Max VD per Controller 8 64 Controller Write Back Cache Policy No Yes
Max VD per Disk Group 8 16 SSD Read Caching No Yes
Max Number of Hot Spare support 8 32 SSD Read/Write Caching No Yes
Max Number of Expanders 0 32 Fast Path SSD VD Optimization No Yes

Figure 3 The scalability of enterprise hardware RAID, in contrast to the very limited capacity options in Software. Figure 4 Standard and optional features available on hardware RAID to drive I/O performance and accelerate applications

CONCLUSION
Minimize the risk you take when protecting your most valuable assets – your data.
Enterprise hardware RAID can provide certain benefits that businesses running mission-critical
applications demand. The advantages of scalability, data protection, manageability and application
acceleration distinguish enterprise hardware RAID over software RAID.

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