FlexRAID™ a.k.a
Flexible RAID a.k.a
RAID F™
Flex
RAID protects data and not disks.
In fact, Flex
RAID has no concept of disk as it can be made to work with all data sources and targets residing anywhere on your local computer, network, or the net.
This paridigm shift is quite powerful.
This means you can recover from both disk failures and data lost (or data access lost) due to
certain user errors and viruses!
Flex
RAID is a new twist on the old age technique of data parity as a way of protecting data.
It isn't meant to obsolete other RAID solutions.
Rather, it provides an additional option to consider.
All RAID solutions come with some sort of compromise, which means you pick the one that closely fits your needs.
As more and more people archive more and more data (also, tape backups are now being replaced with backup to hard disks), traditional RAID solutions simply don't fit as none of them were designed for archiving needs.
When you store a backup image, a movie, music, or any data that is not continuously edited, you are archiving.
You add more data to your archive repository over time, and at times, edit, rename, move, or delete some of that data.
For such needs, the high cost and high risk of traditional RAID solutions is simply not justified.
High risk? Well, yes. With stripped RAIDs (like RAID 5, 10, 0+1, 50, etc.), you lose ALL of your data if anything happens to the RAID volume beyond its fault tolerance.
With Flex
RAID, the only thing you lose beyond its fault tolerance are the faulted data sources.
That means, if you have 5 disks and only one parity (tolerance of one), and you lose two disks (one fault beyond tolerance), the data on the remaining 3 disks is fully readable/writable.
Flex
RAID gets even more interesting in that it supports multiple parity configurations (multiple fault tolerance). Only you decide how much fault tolerance you need.
In theory, you can have an infinite number of parity (fault tolerance) configurations.
In practice, however, you should not have more tolerance than you have source disks.
That is, if you have 5 disks, it won't make sense to have more than 5 parity configurations.
At a one-to-one source/parity ratio, you are essentially mirroring the data.
Flex
RAID supports an infinite number of sources for one parity configuration.
That means you can have one million hard drives in your system and only need one additional hard drive for parity.
Because, Flex
RAID works on the data, source data disks and/or the parity disks need not to have the same size.
For instance, if you have 10x disks of any size(s) in your system, but the largest data size (actual written data) on any one of the disks is 100GB, you can use a 100GB hard disk (or multiple smaller disks amounting to 100GB) as the parity target.
Consequently, most user will use their old cheap disks as parity targets and reserve the larger drives to host the data.
Of course, the parity target disk can be larger than the source data disk, but that would be just wasting space.
Flex
RAID is
currently not suited for use with databases or to protect the operating system partition.
Nevertheless, Flex
RAID is ideal for RAID'ing systems that host:
- System backups
- Ripped CD/DVDs onto hard drive
- All media files (MP3, MPEG, AVI, etc.)
- Pictures
- Documents
- ... pretty much anything that can be deployed onto a NAS server
Flexible Data Protection
Because Flex
RAID employs data based parity, there is no disk or partition restriction.
Hence, Flex
RAID provides:
- File protection (parity on a set of individual files)
- Folder protection (parity on a set of folders)
- Partition protection (parity on a set of partitions)
- Disk protection (parity on a set of disks)
Your RAID can even be a mix-and-match of: a file (just by itself) RAID'ed against a folder against a partition against a disk (HD, Floppy, CD/DVD, etc.).
Features
- Supported on all OS platforms
- Flexible data protection (File, Folder, Partition, or Disk protection - including remote content protection)
- Flexible data recovery
- Data corruption detection (data errors due to failing hard drive or other causes).
- Supports virtually all data targets/devices
- Ability to RAID data residing on multiple and different filesystems
- You can create parity for data that lives virtually anywhere (mix and match):
- Hard drives (internal and external)
- Compact discs (CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray, etc.)
- Floppy discs
- USB thumb drives
- Data on remote locations: Network shares, Internet...
- In sum, any data that is accessible by your operation system
- Ability to capture multiple parity configurations for a multiple disks/targets failure protection
- In the case of a multiple disks/targets failure (above your configured tolerance):
- You only lose the data on the failed drives
- The data on the remaining drives is fully accessible and usable
- Full disk/target independence (take any disk/target offline or to sleep):
- FlexRAID is green friendly
- FlexRAID promotes the powering down of un-used disk drives to save energy.
All current operating systems have this feature built-in.
- You could even power-off the disk drive and take it offline and then re-synch it at a future time
- Featuring Smart Re-Synch (for re-synchronizing parity bits without scanning the drives)
- Fast RAID health validation.
- Ability to express Unit of Risk (UoR) for better data protection
- Web client (for advanced management features and scheduling)
- RAID-6 and RAID∞ (ability to sustain 2 or more UoR failures)
- Only data written counts.
If you had a set of 500GB drives with no more than 100GB written to any of the drives, you would only need 100GB of space (100GB hard drives or larger) for parity.
- Directory spanning for parity segments (RAID onto multiple smaller drives/targets)
For instance, if you had 10x 500GB drives with data and 5x 100GB spare drives, you could use the 5x 100GB drives as parity targets.
- Parity data size will equal the largest directory data size.
In the example above, the parity data would never be larger than 500GB total.
However, it can be significantly less as only data written counts.
More Features
Some other interesting features of Flex
RAID are:
- Support for incremental parity (increments can be restored independently of base parity [and vice-versa] but are not supported by the Smart Re-Synch feature)
- Fast parity computation and data recovery
- Hardware XOR off-loading coming soon
- Customizable for optimal performance (customizable multi-threading and memory usage)
- Can run as either a host service, process, and/or task
- Can be controlled locally or remotely
- Supports Command-Line, Web, and GUI clients
- One or more clients can connect to one or more hosts
(1700GB) pasaré el disco a su nueva ubicación y formatearé los dos equipos, usando como disco de sistema los 2x1TB (uno para cada PC).
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