Recent enhancements to the SCSI and ATA standards allow storage devices to indicate their preferred (and in some cases, required) I/O alignment and I/O size. This information is particularly useful with newer disk drives that increase the physical sector size from 512 byes to 4K bytes. This information may also be beneficial for RAID devices, where the chunk size and stripe size may impact performance.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 provides the ability to read and utilize this information, and optimize how data is read and written from storage devices.

Device Mapper Multipathing (DM-Multipath) creates a single conceptual device from the multiple cables, switches and controllers that connect servers to storage arrays. This enables centralized management of connection devices (also known as paths) and makes it possible to balance loads over all available paths.

DM-Multipath in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 introduces two new options when dynamically balancing load over paths. Paths can now be dynamically selected depending on either the queue size of each path or previous I/O time data.

Volume management creates a layer of abstraction over physical storage by creating logical storage volumes. This provides greater flexibility over just using physical storage directly. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 manages logical volumes using the Logical Volume Manager (LVM).