Software mirroring vs. hardware mirroring

Software mirroring vs. hardware mirroring

Please clarify the difference between software mirroring and hardware mirroring. Will the 865G Intel chipset support hardware mirroring?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

    When you register for SearchStorage.com, you’ll also receive targeted emails from my team of award-winning editorial writers. Our goal is to keep you informed on the hottest topics, the latest news and the biggest challenges you face as a storage professional today.

    Rich Castagna, Editorial Director

    By submitting your registration information to SearchStorage.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchStorage.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

The difference between software mirroring and hardware mirroring is really in where the CPU cycles that perform the mirroring come from. After all, in the end, it's hardware (disks, and the data that is contained on them) that are being mirrored, following software-based instructions.

In software mirroring, a piece of mirroring software, such as Veritas Volume Manager or Sun's Solstice Disk Suite, runs on the server that is attached to the disks that are mirrored, and it does all the heavy lifting associated with the mirroring.

In hardware mirroring, the mirroring work is done on the disk array where the disks are physically located by a CPU that is located in that array. Virtually of the major array vendors have this capability.

As for the ability of a particular chipset to be able to perform this mirroring, it's really a function of the software that has been written for that chipset. If the right code were written for it, your Playstation could mirror disks.

This was first published in July 2004