Western Digital published a thorough analysis which examined the performance distinctions between Power-of-Two (Po2) and Non-Power-of-Two (NPo2) RAID Sets utilizing XINNOR’s xiRAID. The goal was to compare Po2 and NPo2 performance and CPU utilization.
The testing approach employs Western Digital Platforms – Applications Engineering (PAE) standard test suites: Spec Sheet Sequential (SSS) and Spec Sheet Random (SSR), with modifications to showcase performance across the three RAID Life Cycles (Normal, Degraded, and Rebuild). Three iterations of each test are conducted, and their variability is examined using both inter- and intra-Coefficient of Variation (CoV) analysis. The test suites yield two performance metrics: bandwidth (BW) and CPU utilization.
According to the tests xiRAID was again proved as a highly efficient and reliable software RAID solution. xiRAID RAID5 performance for the normal life cycle for read workloads approaches No-RAID performance. Moreover, thanks to AVX, xiRAID consumes minimum CPU resources under sequential workloads.
The whole testing setup and results are available on Western Digtial’s website here.
