- Photos from Afternoon of TechFieldDay – vKernel
Virtualisation Discussion on the back of the Bus.
Getting from place to place to meet the vendors in THEIR OWN offices means a lot of moving around.
And waiting.
Turns out you CAN fit sixteen geeks in those lifts. !
Through the front door at vKernel
Participating in the Round Table at the end of the session to privately discuss what we have just heard about. Digging in and covering the good and the bad of what has been happening.
And then we go on the bus and headed off to EMC.
- Untitled
- RAID is OLD Technology. And it looks it.
One of the interesting parts of getting a presentation from Drobo on their BeyondRAID technology is the realisation that RAID is really a broken and OLD technology. The idea of of taking a chunk a data of data, cracking it into four pieces and creating a CRC for each chunk and then striping that onto identical physical disk sectors shows that the technology was invented a long time ago.
Once upon a time, CPU was scarce, and memory was rare and the possibility of building smart data redundancy required a lot of hardware and software.
What Drobo has conceptually done is to create a RAID of the DATA CHUNK, rather than a RAID of drive sectors and this is delivered in software. By creating chunks, and then distributing them between drive spindles, they defeat the limitations of RAID – physical symmetry of HDD, slow recovery of a failed unit because all CRC’s need to be performed again.
It seems so obvious, but I wonder why Drobo appears to be the only company that is re-thinking the fundamental principle of RAID and putting within reach of normal people. Larger storage arrays have had these features for long time of course, but the price tag has been very high. The case for overcharging for a simple feature may be finished and some features are now available for the lower end of the market.
Outbursts for 9 April 2010
9th April 2010 by 1 Comment
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