RAID data protection remains relevant

January 22, 2009 – 12:46 pm

RAID (Redundant Array of Idle/Independent Disks) has evolved significantly since the original RAID white paper from the University of California Berkeley (Patterson, Gibson & Katz) was published 20 some years ago and in many cases is taken for granted today. There is also debate as to whether RAID is still relevant and practical given the continued increase amounts of data that needs to be protected.

RAID Examples from www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com
Sample of some common RAID levels, general characteristics, caveat and benefits

RAID remains relevant today, granted, RAID continues to evolve as do the many variations including distributed and hybrid data protection schemes. Dave Raffo over at SearchStorage has a nice article on "The evolution of RAID data protection" with comments from me as well as from my pal and blogger extrodinair Steve Foskett "aka the storage pack ratt". Have a look at the Dave’s article (as well as here) along with some of the comments and thoughts from Steve, myself and others.

Cheers – gs

Technorati tags: Dave Raffo, SearchStorage, Steve Foskett, RAID, Patterson, Gibson, Katz

Share this post:

Greg Schulz

Hello Rob and appreciate the comments.

I would concur that RAID is more about availability or protection from device failure; however in general, it tends to get lumped in under the more generic data protection umbrella. RAID by itself is not a replacement for backup or other data protection techniques that introduce some form of a point in time consistent copy or view of the data.

However RAID and data mirroring/replication for that matter when combined with some form of time based data protection to establish or meet and RPO, are part of an overall data availability and data protection approach.

Cheers
gs
Rob McCrea

Greg,

I agree RAID is a fundamental component of data storage and isn't going to be going away any time soon. I do question the use of the word 'protection' in combination with RAID. It is a small semantic issue but one that seems to confuse many, many people. While RAID does provide some 'protection' in regards to an actual disk failure it does not actually provide any 'data protection'.

The only reason I am being picky about this is because I see the effects of people believing they are being 'protected' by RAID in the sense that a backup would protect them recent public example being Journalspace http://www.backupcentral.com/index.php?option=c...

While I didn't see that one in the lab I have seen many others. I saw so many of them a while back I made a post about it myself http://www.zebralogic.ca/node/4 to have a place to point IT people I run into that mis-understand what RAID is all about.

All that said I think RAID is essential to keeping data available.

Thanks for the post!

Cheers,

Rob

StorageIOblog