Overview of EBS Raid Configurations

We shall now be giving details about EBS Raid Configurations and different types of the raid.

  • A RAID set is a group of disks (2 to 18+) to appear to operating system as a Volume
  • RAID is done for
    • faster I/O
    • a larger volume
    • increased fault tolerance
  • In EC2 only mirrored or striped RAID sets are available
  • Get reads and writes in parallel by spreading data amongst disks
  • EBS volume data is replicated across multiple servers in an AZ
  • It prevents loss of data from failure of any single component.
  • Use EBS multi-volume snapshots to back up data of EBS volumes in RAID
  • RAID 0
    • When I/O performance is crucial than fault tolerance
    • I/O is distributed across volumes in a stripe. If you add volume, results in more throughput.
    • Performance is limited to worst performing volume in set
    • Loss of a single volume results in a complete data loss for the array.
    • Size of array is sum of sizes of volumes within it
    • Bandwidth is sum of available bandwidth of volumes within it
    • two 500 GiB EBS io1 volumes with 4,000 provisioned IOPS will result 1000 GiB RAID 0 array with bandwidth of 8,000 IOPS and 1,000 MiB/s of throughput
  • RAID 1
    • When fault tolerance is critical
    • No write performance improvement
    • Needs more EC2 to EBS bandwidth as data is written to multiple volumes simultaneously.
    • Size and bandwidth equals to size and bandwidth of volumes in array
    • two 500 GiB EBS io1 volumes with 4,000 provisioned IOPS will result 500 GiB RAID 1 array with bandwidth of 4,000 IOPS and 500 MiB/s of throughput.
  • RAID 5 and RAID 6 are not recommended for EBS due to parity write operations
  • RAID 0 array gives higher performance for file system against single EBS volume.
  • RAID 1 array offers a “mirror” of data for extra redundancy.
  • Decide before, RAID array size and IOPS to provision for.

Become AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate with hundreds of real-time exam questions and 100% pass guarantee. Try Free Test Now!

Menu