Add RAID support to LabVIEW Real Time

[Norbert_B]

Streaming data is an important part for many applications. If the amount of data is very large, a RAID can improve system performance significantly.

Sadly, RAID is currently not supported for RT so Real Time Applications cannot use this valuable tool for enhancing streaming performance.

On Hypervisor systems, RAIDs can be used, but data has to be passed from the RT to Windows first. So streaming does not work like/with DMA but it uses CPU load which is in fact a waste of resources.

Norbert

[Texas_Diaz]

We've actually investigated adding RAID in LabVIEW Real-Time multiple times, but the issue that comes up every time is that most RAID controllers are proprietary and require driver development for each one, or else we would have to implement or port our own primarily software-only RAID solutions.  We would prefer to work with a hardware-only RAID where the RAID controller would handle multiple disks and provide a SATA-like interface that the OS can use.  Product offerings that we (as in NI) have for PXI include the PXI-8260, but that product is a software-managed JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) and really isn't a "RAID" since there's no fault tolerance (e.g. mirroring, parity, etc...).  Additional offerings in the PXI-8162/3/4/5 require a rack-mount external setup but are still RAID0 software raids, no better than JBOD except that they support striping without parity (which is almost impossible to recover from if one disk fails).  

The limiting factor for RAID on RT is driver development and maintenance.