- "Diskosaurs" bite back
- Time to bury big-drive "diskosaurs"
- Upgrading to solid state
- Infiniband: Back from the dead again?
- Sleeping laptops leave encryption at risk
- The death knell for RAID?
- Virtualizing the whole shebang
- A new focus on storage advice
- Storage Sprawl Podcast: Closing doors to data
- Storage Sprawl Podcast: The new 'dispersed storage' model
October 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Is EMC focusing too much on software?
I have mixed feelings about the latest flow of announcements from EMC. EMC makes some interesting promises on the hardware front, including a greener Symmetrix box and Clariion arrays that can walk and chew gum, I mean handle iSCSI and FC traffic at the same time.
What I find suprising is that EMC has not yet implemented RAID 6, a feature already embraced by many vendors that deploy SATA drives. You may remember a discussion we had in June on this blog about SATA and RAID 5 .
A quick wrap up of that discussion is that RAID 6 can reduce the vulnerability caused by the failure of a second drive when one is akready being re-built.
Obviously, larger drives trigger a longer rebuild time hence data loss if a second drive breaks during that time and you have RAID 5. RAID 6 controllers implement dual parity, so can survive the simultaneous failure of two drives.
In all fairness, I haven't tested in person how long does it take to rebuild a SATA drive on a Clariion but other vendors have measured on their own hardware a 4 to 12 hours elapsed time or longer.
Is EMC focusing too much on software and acquisitions and loosing touch with hardware?
Posted by Mario Apicella on October 25, 2006 06:55 AM
RATE THIS ARTICLE:
-
- COMMENTS
Sorry Mario but the idea that EMC is "losing touch" with hardware because they're currently evaluating RAID 6 is nonsense.
The performance hit of these early RAID 6 implementations can be crippling when that second disk drops and you have two parity calculations happening. What EMC have put into FLARE is proactive sparing, if a disk starts operating outside of norms the data on the disk is copied to a hotspare, this reduces the risk of a double disk failure occurring during a rebuild operation later on as the system is going around proactively sparing bad devices before they fail, not waiting for them to fail and then triggering a rebuild.
EMC didn't have 4GB capable systems when their competitors were dropping 4GB ports into the front end of their old 2GB systems and then claiming that had 4GB systems. EMC waited until they could have 4GB end to end with UltraScale. Did people think they were losing touch with hardware then?
If they did they were wrong, and they'd be wrong now too.
Posted by: Storagezilla at October 25, 2006 12:30 PM| STORAGE SPRAWL PODCAST |
| Listen to the latest podcast: |
| MP3 • RSS • Get Podcast • Archive • Mobilize |
TOP STORIES
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Network Storage: Patterns, Trends & Business Needs
- Application Security: Threats and How to Counter Them
- Remote Access: Maintain Security and Decrease the Burden on IT
- Disaster Recovery in Minutes
- Reduce Recovery Times and Tape Costs
- Secure, recover, and archive critical information
