Product manual

Galaxy G3G12 / G3G16 - Installation and Hardware Reference Manual
223 Section 7 Technology Background
RAID 60 –Striping of Double Parity
RAID 60 combines both RAID 6 and RAID 0 features. Data is striped across disks as in RAID 0, and it uses
double distributed parity as in RAID 6. RAID 60 provides data reliability, good overall performance and
supports larger volume sizes.
RAID 60 also provides very high reliability because data is still available even if multiple disk drives fail (two
in each axle). The greater the number of axles, the greater the number of disk drives that can fail without the
RAID 60 array going offline.
RAID 60 arrays consist of eight or more physical drives.
Using a Galaxy3G subsystem expanded with four JBOD subsystems, your RAID 60 array supports up to 60
physical drives. See “Configuring JBOD Expansion” in chapter 2. However, we recommend that you set
aside a few physical drives as hot spares..
Recommended applications: Video and Imaging Editing, Accounting, financial, and database servers; and
any application requiring very high availability. Strongly recommended for RAIDs using SATA disk drives.
RAID 60 Axles
When you create a RAID 60, you must specify the number of axles. An axle refers to a single RAID 6 array
that is striped with other RAID 6 arrays to make RAID 60. An axle can have from 4 to 16 physical drives,
depending on the number of physical drives in the array.
Data
Stripes
Double Distributed Parity
Disk Drives
Axle 1
Axle 2
Fig 7.1f RAID 60: Striping axles of RAID 6