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 RAID5.

• What are the availability trade-offs?

  Mirroring and RAID5 metadevices both increase data availability, but they both generally have lower performance, especially for write operations. Mirroring does improve random read performance.

• What are the hardware cost trade-offs?

  RAID5 metadevices have a lower hardware cost than mirroring. Both striped metadevices and concatenated metadevices have no additional hardware cost.