A few months ago, Overland began to deliver our Tiered Data Protection Strategy that has been in the works for over a year. Over the past few weeks, I have had the opportunity to discuss, face-to-face with partners, end-users, press and analysts worldwide about the evolution of not only storage technology but also Overland's portfolio.
As a hardware data protection company of over 26 years, Overland's obvious focus was on tape automation at the start. As storage has evolved, so have business storage requirements and storage tiers. Hence, Overland's introduction of D2D2T and virtual tape libraries over 4 years ago and nearline data protection almost a year ago.
As the tiered data protection story builds, it becomes more and more obvious for business continuity to focus on data protection and disaster recovery. The most critical component in overall business continuity resides on the tier that actually contains this data - RAID arrays.
Without maintaining integrity of primary/critical data, backups, restores and archives would be useless.
As long as electronic data storage has existed, there has always been a clear use model for redundant disk drives. Over time, as more and more information become more heavily relied upon and, therefore, more critical, drive failure became an absolute fear, and often times, a living nightmare.
RAID 5 helped solved a number of the issues not addressed by RAID 0 and RAID 1 and have been acceptable until about a couple of years ago. As disk drives become bigger and faster, so has the responsibility of the arrays containing them.
RAID 5, as you may already know, provides data protection when up to one disk drive fails within a single RAID set. This addresses major instances such as drive motor failures or a head crash. Years have progressed and so have the studies of drive failure tendencies...
These studies show that independent disk drive failures are not nearly as common as drive failures related to power supply spikes or "hot spots" within an enclosure -- sometimes caused by a temporary loss of airflow or unusual room temperature instability.
Beyond technical/mechanical failures, additional risk is introduced when human interactivity is required. For example, in a RAID 5 set with a single drive failure, a user is required to remove and replace the drive.
What happens when the user removes the wrong drive?
...unfortunately, all information on the degraded RAID set is then completely lost. Yes...lost. Sounds almost too easy (and risky), right?
Picture such a catastrophe that affects terabytes of data, maybe even for a multi-million dollar organization. The information, or lifeblood, of this organization is now extinct, forcing the organization to go offline and rely solely on their business continuity implementation... Wouldn't it be nice not to have to go that far?
It is nice not to have to rely so heavily on BC and for this reason, Overland Storage has introduced RAID 6 support in ULTAMUS RAID, along with RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and 50!
RAID 6 is truly the first line of defense in BC. Without redundant data protection at the critical information layer, business continuity does not have a sufficient foundation to be built upon.
Not to say that RAID 6 allows IT departments to become lax when defining and implementing their business continuity strategy.
Ensuring that information at the critical data tier should be the very first priority when compiling a sound BC strategy.
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Kevin Wise
Product Manager