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Data Management

What Is RAID, And Why Should Your Server Have It?

Did you know you can increase storage functions and reliability through the redundancy of RAID?

RAID is an acronym for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks.”

RAID was first developed in the late 1980’s because servers were encountering a dramatic increase in the amount of data they needed to store.

Storage drives were really expensive then and would cost a fortune if ever you needed to replace one.

By having RAID on your server you were able to use a large number of low cost hard drives and link them together to form a single large capacity storage device, which offered greater performance, storage capacity and reliability over older storage solutions.

It has been used mainly in the server markets, but over the past few years RAID has become much more common in end user systems.

There are three major advantages by having RAID.

 

Redundancy
This allows for a form of data backup in the storage array in the event of a hard drive failure.

If one of the drives in the array failed, it could be easily swapped out for a new drive (without the need to turn the system off, this is referred to as “Hot-Swappable”) or you could continue to use the other drives in the array.

Performance
Depending on which level of RAID you are using and how many hard drives you have in the array you can increase the read/write speed of your drives.

Lower Costs
You can set it up so that you have several inexpensive (low capacity) hard disk drives brought together to make up one big (high capacity) disk drive.

Also in the event you need to replace a hard drive you will not have as much down time if you chose a RAID level that supports redundancy.

Types Of RAID
There are several different RAID levels, and each has advantages over the other. Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, you can choose between (these are just the most common choices) RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5.

RAID 0 is a base confi guration called striping, which requires a minimum of 2 disks. With RAID 0 all of the drives in the array will appear as one drive with the sum of all drives adding up to make one big hard drive.

The logical disk is then created with “stripes” which run a crossed each disk in the array. The advantage of having RAID 0 is that you gain storage space as each disk is seen as one giant logical disk. However if one drive goes bad, then all of the data is lost and there is no way of retrieving it.

RAID 1 is the second base configuration and it is called mirroring. Like RAID 0, this level of RAID also requires a minimum of 2 disks and can only be used with an even number of disks. RAID 1 provides data integrity. Instead of each disk showing up as one giant logical drive as with RAID 0, RAID 1 will mirror any data that is written to one of the disk’s in the array, and copy the data to all of the other disks in that array.

Therefore if one of the mirrored drives goes bad, no data is lost as it is on the other drives in the array. The bad drive can then be replaced and the data can be copied back over automatically (if set up to do so).

RAID 5 is the most commonly used RAID level. It combines the features of RAID 0 and RAID 1. It requires a minimum of 3 disks in the array.

RAID 5 uses the same striping aspect as in RAID 0, however not all of a stripe is made available for data storage.

Part of each stripe is reserved for parity. Parity is used to ensure the integrity of the array by comparing two bits of data and then it forms a third data bit, in which each bit is on a different physical disk drive based upon the fi rst two bits, leaving you with 2/3 of your storage.

However depending on which disk dies, each triplet will lose one of the bits built by the RAID level.

Either bit 1, bit 2 or the parity, but with the other 2 existing on a different disk, the third can be quickly calculated and replaced onto the replacement drive.

 

Gone In Sixty Seconds: Protecting Your Laptop & Data

September was a whirlwind travel month for me, having been in both Charlotte, North Carolina and Chicago in the last three weeks of the month.The training is great, but as anyone who has traveled lately knows, the airports can become a real challenge.

I was waiting in the Charlotte airport for my return flight to Detroit, and watched an awful story unfold.

A passenger, who was obviously a business owner or executive was searching frantically for his laptop case. After about 20 minutes, airport police showed up and it turns out his laptop had been stolen.

Business owners as well as your average everyday computer users are turning to laptops more and more each and every day, due to their mobility and the ability to keep them in touch with the office no matter where they are.

A huge importance that many seem to forget is keeping their data safe, and doing regular backups. I would guess that every three in five users are not performing any type of backups. They run the huge risk of losing all their valuable data, programs, and even their entire computer as the gentleman in the airport did.

It is crucial to have a backup solution in place, especially for business owners who keep most of their work information on their laptop computer.

With today’s technology options, you can find a backup solution that will work for you, and there seems to be a price range for everybody.

Backups can be performed in several ways, from a manual backup to a CD or DVD, some form of removable media like a flash drive, or SD card, and there are even the higher end solutions like BDR and off site backups.

Typically a backup solution would come with a piece of software to control your backups. Things such as what you’re backing up, how often your backing up, and where you want the backups to go.

The beauty of using software is it almost completely automates the process, and becomes something you don’t have to worry about any longer, knowing that if your computer is stolen, or your hard drive suddenly crashes out, you have a good copy of your data, and you can be back up and running in no time at all.

My favorite solution is the offsite backup, which can be offered thanks to the Internet. With an offsite backup system, data that is on your laptop, workstation, or server(s) can be sent out across the Internet (typically encrypted) to an offsite location.

So for example, you could be working at your company, and having all your daily additions to a highly secure data center out in the cloud. This would protect your information from a disaster such as a building burning down, or a fatal hardware crash.

If that sounds like overkill for your situation, an easier solution can be used, such as backing up once a week to a flash drive.

All Windows based systems have a utility built in called Backup and Restore. This utility will allow users to backup just their  personal data, such as pictures, documents, emails, etc. or even take it a step further and back up the entire computer’s  configuration, including the data.

Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore is most useful for disaster recovery when your PC malfunctions.

This feature helps you create complete PC backups, and then in the event of a serious system issue or data loss, Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore can restore your entire PC environment, including the operating system, installed programs, user settings, and data files.

If you do not have currently have a backup solution implemented, please contact our technical support team. We can work with you to set up backups to a flash drive or CD.

We also have a great offsite solution for $39.99 per month that will keep all of your data safe in the event of a failure. It works transparently in the background, encrypting and forwarding your data to our data center, where’s it is stored and updated as needed.

The best thing about this type of solution is that it doesn’t require you to do anything – the backups occur automatically, and we’re notified if there is ever a problem where your backup didn’t complete properly.