RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?
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Back in the day, the Redundant Array of Independent Disks technology, or simply RAID, was considered the king of the storage landscape. Now, however, we see some evident and growing challenges around common RAID levels that are pushing storage makers to turn to alternative data protection mechanisms.Read the full article by Karim Buzdar, a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate for Server Infrastructure to learn if RAID is the right solution to protect your data.
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First off, let me start by saying that by and large, I agree with what was written and the conclusion. I have just a couple of comments.
Everybody say it with me: RAID is not a backup. One more time with feeling: RAID IS NOT A BACKUP!
From the Article emphasis mine:
Today’s customers are used to accessing data instantly without any interruptions or errors. Unlike most of the recent storage technologies, RAID can never be used to store mission-centric and critical business files. Reason being, you may have protection against hardware failure but when it comes to protection against corrupt files, errors or malicious activity, you have serious vulnerabilities.
I have a problem with the bold text. Most of us, all day, every day have our 'mission-centric and critical business files' stored on RAID (hopefully 10, or 6). RAID does what it is supposed to do: Protects against hardware failures. For corrupt files or malicious activity, there should be backups to restore from.
Even the mention of RAIN in the conclusion does nothing against corrupt files or malicious activity to my knowledge.
Say it again: Raid is not a backup!
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@dafyre said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
Even the mention of RAIN in the conclusion does nothing against corrupt files or malicious activity to my knowledge.
That's correct.
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What a pointless article
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He thinks that RAID 5 is the standard?
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"Will the new and comparatively expensive alternatives like erasure coding, local reconstruction codes and Redundant Area of Independent Nodes prove to be more reliable and can RAID keep up with the latest generation of high capacity hard drives? – We think not. The new storage technology may be expensive but it definitely serves us with better data protection and high performance. So who will be the new king of the storage landscape; only time will tell."
- Erasure encoding is not new, that's RAID 5, for example. He's using a term he doesn't even know.
- RAIN has already moved into this place.
This article looks like it was written in 2008 by someone just hearing about RAID in their first college class.
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Did anyone really expect a vendor posted article to be useful?
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@rojoloco said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
Did anyone really expect a vendor posted article to be useful?
They have loads of good ones. This one was written by a guy who has nothing but a degree in the wrong field, and an entry level foot in the door of the helpdesk cert to claim as his credentials.
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There is a fundamental misunderstanding from this author about why RAID exists, and that is to offer some immunity to hard drive failure, nothing more, nothing less.
Reason being, you may have protection against hardware failure but when it comes to protection against corrupt files, errors or malicious activity, you have serious vulnerabilities.
Well no shit sherlock. RAID is purely to protect you against the first bit, a decent backup scheme protects against the second, it was never conceived of or designed to do more than protect against hardware failure.
Since there is an increased stress on the array when data bits are gathered to rebuild the failed and erroneous disc, there is the potential risk of double-disk fault and read error – hence the shift from RAID to more recent data storage mechanisms.
Umm, more recent data storage mechanisms? What, like RAID10? Any "mecahnism" that involves data spread out across lots of disks with some sort of redundancy is going to be a RAID array by definition. It is an Redundant Array (or collection) of Independent Disks after all.
What an idiotic out of touch (and date) article.
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@jrc exactly, this is written like a homework assignment of someone who just heard about RAID in a freshman class, and wrote a really bad paper mostly lifted from Wikipedia (including the pictures), but without context and with a fundamentally wrong understanding of the topic. This would get a passing grade in a low end college, but only because it is "moderately acceptable homework", nothing more.
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Also, isn't RAIN basically an array of RAIDs ??
And there, I posted a comment for the author on his article.
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@jrc said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
Also, isn't RAIN basically an array of RAIDs ??
No, that would be Network RAID.
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@scottalanmiller said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@jrc said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
Also, isn't RAIN basically an array of RAIDs ??
No, that would be Network RAID.
That how would you define RAIN? Wouldn't each node be a NAS of some sort, and more than likely that NAS would be configured with RAID, or am I missing something?
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@jrc said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@jrc said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
Also, isn't RAIN basically an array of RAIDs ??
No, that would be Network RAID.
That how would you define RAIN? Wouldn't each node be a NAS of some sort, and more than likely that NAS would be configured with RAID, or am I missing something?
It depends. RAIN is a blanket term for a lot of things, unlike RAID which is quite specific. You could make a great argument that Network RAID is a member of the RAIN family.
But in general terms, if you use Network RAID (treating each node as a disk) it's not called RAIN.
RAIN is assumed to have nodal awareness. RAID treats all members as drives and can't tell what is a node, and what is a drive.
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@scottalanmiller said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@jrc said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@jrc said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
Also, isn't RAIN basically an array of RAIDs ??
No, that would be Network RAID.
That how would you define RAIN? Wouldn't each node be a NAS of some sort, and more than likely that NAS would be configured with RAID, or am I missing something?
It depends. RAIN is a blanket term for a lot of things, unlike RAID which is quite specific. You could make a great argument that Network RAID is a member of the RAIN family.
But in general terms, if you use Network RAID (treating each node as a disk) it's not called RAIN.
RAIN is assumed to have nodal awareness. RAID treats all members as drives and can't tell what is a node, and what is a drive.
What type of system would be a good example of RAIN? Gluster? Ceph? or am I totally missing the boat?
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@dafyre said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@jrc said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@jrc said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
Also, isn't RAIN basically an array of RAIDs ??
No, that would be Network RAID.
That how would you define RAIN? Wouldn't each node be a NAS of some sort, and more than likely that NAS would be configured with RAID, or am I missing something?
It depends. RAIN is a blanket term for a lot of things, unlike RAID which is quite specific. You could make a great argument that Network RAID is a member of the RAIN family.
But in general terms, if you use Network RAID (treating each node as a disk) it's not called RAIN.
RAIN is assumed to have nodal awareness. RAID treats all members as drives and can't tell what is a node, and what is a drive.
What type of system would be a good example of RAIN? Gluster? Ceph? or am I totally missing the boat?
Yes, Cluster, CEPH, SCRIBE, Exablox... all RAIN. Traditional RAIN by everyone's standards.
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@scottalanmiller said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@dafyre said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@jrc said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@jrc said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
Also, isn't RAIN basically an array of RAIDs ??
No, that would be Network RAID.
That how would you define RAIN? Wouldn't each node be a NAS of some sort, and more than likely that NAS would be configured with RAID, or am I missing something?
It depends. RAIN is a blanket term for a lot of things, unlike RAID which is quite specific. You could make a great argument that Network RAID is a member of the RAIN family.
But in general terms, if you use Network RAID (treating each node as a disk) it's not called RAIN.
RAIN is assumed to have nodal awareness. RAID treats all members as drives and can't tell what is a node, and what is a drive.
What type of system would be a good example of RAIN? Gluster? Ceph? or am I totally missing the boat?
Yes, Cluster, CEPH, SCRIBE, Exablox... all RAIN. Traditional RAIN by everyone's standards.
I'm familiar with Gluster and Ceph. Exablox is not open source...
SCRIBE is done by @scale -- so it's not open source, right?
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Well, I think you guys really RAIN'd on this guys parade. Good work.
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@dafyre said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@dafyre said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@jrc said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
@jrc said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
Also, isn't RAIN basically an array of RAIDs ??
No, that would be Network RAID.
That how would you define RAIN? Wouldn't each node be a NAS of some sort, and more than likely that NAS would be configured with RAID, or am I missing something?
It depends. RAIN is a blanket term for a lot of things, unlike RAID which is quite specific. You could make a great argument that Network RAID is a member of the RAIN family.
But in general terms, if you use Network RAID (treating each node as a disk) it's not called RAIN.
RAIN is assumed to have nodal awareness. RAID treats all members as drives and can't tell what is a node, and what is a drive.
What type of system would be a good example of RAIN? Gluster? Ceph? or am I totally missing the boat?
Yes, Cluster, CEPH, SCRIBE, Exablox... all RAIN. Traditional RAIN by everyone's standards.
I'm familiar with Gluster and Ceph. Exablox is not open source...
SCRIBE is done by @scale -- so it's not open source, right?
Correct, it is closed source.
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@pchiodo said in RAID - the king of the storage landscape or legacy?:
Well, I think you guys really RAIN'd on this guys parade. Good work.
You were hoping for a RAIDing party?
