Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide

Providing RAID 1+0 and RAID 0+1

Solaris Volume Manager supports both RAID 1+0 (which is like having mirrors that are then striped) and RAID 0+1 (stripes that are then mirrored) redundancy, depending on the context. The Solaris Volume Manager interface makes it appear that all RAID 1 devices are strictly RAID 0+1, but Solaris Volume Manager recognizes the underlying components and mirrors each individually, when possible.


Note –

Solaris Volume Manager cannot always provide RAID 1+0 functionality. However, in a best practices environment, where both submirrors are identical to each other and are made up of disk slices (and not soft partitions), RAID 1+0 will be possible.


For example, with a pure RAID 0+1 implementation and a two-way mirror that consists of three striped slices, a single slice failure could fail one side of the mirror. And, assuming that no hot spares were in use, a second slice failure would fail the mirror. Using Solaris Volume Manager, up to three slices could potentially fail without failing the mirror, because each of the three striped slices are individually mirrored to their counterparts on the other half of the mirror.

Consider this example:

Figure 9–2 RAID 1+ 0 Example

Diagram shows how three of six total slices in a RAID 1 volume can potentially fail without data loss because of the RAID 1+0 implementation.

Mirror d1 consists of two submirrors, each of which consists of three identical physical disks and the same interlace value. A failure of three disks, A, B, and F can be tolerated because the entire logical block range of the mirror is still contained on at least one good disk.

If, however, disks A and D fail, a portion of the mirror's data is no longer available on any disk and access to these logical blocks will fail.

When a portion of a mirror's data is unavailable due to multiple slice errors, access to portions of the mirror where data is still available will succeed. Under this situation, the mirror acts like a single disk that has developed bad blocks. The damaged portions are unavailable, but the rest is available.