What sort of data do you really have?

I spend a lot of time rabbiting on about using the correct RAID type to suit your data. RAID 5, 6, 50 or 60 (parity RAID) for streaming data and RAID 1, 10, 1E for random data (database). However, it has come to my attention that not a lot of people are really fully aware of exactly what type of data they have.

There is now an easy answer to work this question out. Adaptec are releasing a software product called “MaxIQ Predictor”. The product is designed to capture data from a system, then analyse it to determine whether that system would be a suitable candidate for the MaxIQ Hybrid Array (SSD Caching) Product we now sell, but this new software product actually has many more uses.

Yes, it will tell you whether you’d benefit from SSD Caching, but much more importantly, it will tell you the percentage of random vs sequential reads and writes that are happening in your system. For most people this will highlight the type of data they are running on their systems. This is useful information for determining exactly what sort of RAID array, and what type of disks you should actually be running in your system to achieve best performance (with or without an SSD Cache drive).

This product will be available on our website soon. It’s a command line tool that uses industry standard ways of capturing data that can be analysed by the predictor tool. You don’t neeed to be running an Adaptec product for this to work, or even in fact have RAID in your system … you just capture data for a couple of hours then analyse the output of the system, changing a few variables so that you can set your baseline for your current system. The software currently works on Windows and 32-bit Linux, and I hear on the grapvevine that we’ll be spreading this to VMware and various other platforms in the near future.

The really interesting part is when I’ve run this on customer systems most customers are very surprised at exactly what sort of data they are pushing through their storage … most have no idea.

So if you’d like to try this software now, get a hold of your local Adaptec Field Engineer (don’t ask a salesperson unless you want an earful about our products ). Alternatively, send me an email (neil_cameron@adaptec.com) and I’ll send out the software to you. I can just see my editor (Adaptec Marketing Guru) falling off his chair about now, but what the heck … we have the technology, it’s out and about so why shouldn’t everyone be testing their system to see whether their current RAID type is actually suitable for their data … no matter what or whose RAID product you are using.

I’ll be very interested to see if this blog makes the cold hard light of day.

Ciao
Neil