My life has been a lie. Up until reading this article, I thought my RAID setup was providing a backup of my data. I’ve longed idolized ZFS for its robust snapshotting capabilities, thinking that was a formidable backup as well. My walls of perception have been torn asunder by the fundamental question of what actually is a backup. This Socratic examination goes to the root of the question.
RAID
2005 Called, They Want Their Storage Issues Back
Gabriel Chapman of Thankfully the RAID is Gone comments: Bear with me folks, as this is going to be a two-parter, and yes I ramble when I write, which is also how I speak. Like many people who work in the technology field, I’m a bit of a pack rat when it comes to old […]
Object storage bods Exablox: RAID is dead, baby. RAID is dead
Chris Mellor of The Register comments: Object storage supplier Exablox has provided a file interface to its OneBlox object store, which is basically a Drobo-style BYOD store – Bring Your Own Disks. El Storage asked Sean Derrington, senior director of products at Exablox, some questions about the company. Some of the answers have been edited […]
Solving SSD Power Spike Issues
Jim Handy of The SSD Guy comments: The following guest post was contributed by Doug Dumitru the CTO of Easy Computing Company (EasyCo), a software R&D company which develops and markets SSD performance enhancement solutions It would appear that you could build an all-SSD array by simply replacing all of the HDDs in a cabinet […]
Hard drives and UREs (or “What’s really going on?”)
Matt Simmons, the Standalone Sysadmin comments: Yesterday, I was reading a thread that asked about failure scenarios involving RAID-5, and like all discussions related to RAID-5, it was full of misinformation stemming from misunderstanding. A lot of the comments seemed to think that because Unrecoverable Read Errors (UREs) were presented as probabilities across bits read, […]
SSDs Vs. RAID? Fix RAID
Howard Marks writing for Network Computing comments: SSD write endurance limitations could cause problems for RAID. But rather than adjust SSDs to support RAID, we should tweak or replace RAID to suit SSDs. Read more at: SSDs Vs. RAID? Fix RAID
Tech Field Day Boston: The Links
As usual, the Tech Field Day event received massive amounts of attention, generating thousands of tweets and dozens of blog posts and videos from delegates and bystanders alike. We will attempt to collect those links here for reference and review.
Disastrous Thinking
If you don’t cluster your arrays, how do you protect against the failure of a RAID rank? Statistically unlikely but it is it more or less unlikely than a loss of data-centre? I’m not sure and the failure of a RAID rank for many people could well mean the invocation of the disaster recovery plan. Why?
We Hold These (Storage) Truths…
I usually welcome discussion (and even argument) about the things I know best: There is always more to learn, and the best insights come through engaging those who disagree with us. But some ideas have been argued so well for so long that they deserve enshrinement. For example, although non-scientists like to argue about evolution […]
EMC Symmetrix: Dynamic Hot Spares
There are two types of sparing strategies available on EMC Symmetrix Series of machines. In this post we will discuss the benefits and the criteria’s related to the use of Dynamic Hot Spares on EMC Symmetrix Systems.