RAID On Win2000.Finally storage is no longer a Microsoft afterthought af·ter·thought n. An idea, response, or explanation that occurs to one after an event or decision. afterthought Noun 1. . Like many businesses, my office runs a variety of operating systems Operating systems can be categorized by technology, ownership, licensing, working state, usage, and by many other characteristics. In practice, many of these groupings may overlap. on its computers. We don't always instantly install the latest from Microsoft, so some are on Win95 or 98. A couple of them are based on Win2000. After years of considering storage as a hardware or software afterthought, Microsoft has added numerous storage-centric characteristics to the various software options. Some are painful such as NT's habit of mapping all of the storage to itself. Some are colossally useful, like the ability to manage RAID on win2000. Readers of CTR See click-through rate. are aware that RAID remains one of the fundamental storage technologies, grown by the server generation and made ubiquitous by the meteoric me·te·or·ic adj. 1. Of, relating to, or formed by a meteoroid. 2. Of or relating to the earth's atmosphere. 3. growth of data to be managed. RAID provides reliability for disk services under Windows 2000 and its predecessor Windows NT (Windows New Technology) A 32-bit operating system from Microsoft for Intel x86 CPUs. NT is the core technology in Windows 2000 and Windows XP (see Windows). Available in separate client and server versions, it includes built-in networking and preemptive multitasking. . A technology that is more than ten years old, RAID has evolved into a mature and well-understood solution for high-availability storage. You have followed almost all of RAID's evolution here in these pages. RAID itself s clearly comprehended by all tiers of computing from entry level to enterprise. What is less comprehensible com·pre·hen·si·ble adj. Readily comprehended or understood; intelligible. [Latin compreh is the continuing need for better tools to administer high-availability disk subsystems. That's where an intriguing part of Windows 2000 enters the picture. Volume management in Windows 2000 is controlled by two elements: the FTDisk driver and the Logical Disk Manager. FTDisk manages what Windows 2000 calls basic disks: simple and extended partitions and fault-tolerant sets. The Logical Disk Manager (LDM LDM Logical Disk Manager LDM Local Data Manager LDM Logical Data Model LDM Last Days Ministries LDM Lorenzo de' Medici School (Florence, Italy and Austin, TX) LDM Limited Distance Modem LDM Long Distance Modem ) provides a level of abstraction The level of complexity by which a system is viewed. The higher the level, the less detail. The lower the level, the more detail. The highest level of abstraction is the single system itself. on top of those basic volume management tools. The main difference between FTDisk and LDM is that LDM creates its volumes on soft partitions. Each physical disk gets a single hard partition. LDM then creates a database that manages all the logical disk volume information. This level of abstraction provides several benefits for storage administrators, including the new Distributed File System Software that keeps track of files stored across multiple networks. When the data are requested, it converts the file names into the physical location of the file so it can be found. and NT File System enhancements. What does this mean for RAID devices? RAID sets can now be created, broken, rebuilt, and administered online-all from the Management Console A terminal or workstation used to monitor and control a network. See Microsoft Management Console. . Having a graphical tool that supports the configuration and management of multiple RAID systems from a central console is a step forward in storage management on the OS. It may be unreasonable to expect of an OS, but Win 2000 could use a toolset for automated performance monitoring of RAID systems. Windows 2000 already gives us extensive monitoring options for I/O (Input/Output) The transfer of data between the CPU and a peripheral device. Every transfer is an output from one device and an input to another. See PC input/output. I/O - Input/Output subsystems, but the tools for monitoring RAID controllers are a bit lacking. When system administrators set up RAID configurations, they naturally make decisions about key parameters-cache size, for example--that they may want to change as the system gets used and applications are added and subtracted. Without good monitoring tools, managing high-reliability disk systems is largely a trial-and-error exercise and the increasing value of data makes gambling a non-option. This may become even more important as Web servers attach to databases. Application characteristics change and configuration flexibility will only become more important. In fact, it would really help if the configuration tools for a high-availability I/O subsystem were aware of the I/O characteristics of the underlying databases and BackOffice tools. Such tools would give a system administrator the knowledge to build the best array configuration possible for a given combination of software and application I/O characteristics. Third-party tools for supporting RAID system performance monitoring and for supporting dynamic reconfiguration of RAID systems based on real-time utilization are around the corner. While Microsoft's Management Console doesn't provide these tools natively, it does support the addition of third-party tools to extend the value of the disk system. With so much depending on intelligent storage hardware and software investments, RAID has become the insurance policy, ensuring availability for an organization's applications. With RAID being such an essential feature of larger systems, it is reasonable to expect the new flexibility of Windows 2000's storage architecture to be exploited by third-party management and performance tools. |
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