In bad econnomic times we still need to purchase storage

Today was not a good day for the US stock market. The Dow dropped 770 points and the Nasdq lost almost 200 points.

So why am I noting all this gloom on the Sunstar Blog Site - after all Sunstar Company is a data storage and backup company.

Quite simply - our data continues to grow and we need to ensure that the data we have is available be it on RAID storage or perhaps archived onto tape. Look at your home computer, yes we are adding more data all the time and backup up less frequently. This we knno is not good. The disk drive manufacturers are increasing the drive capacities for two basic reasons: Technology alows for larger capacity and secondly, the consumers demand more capacity. Bottom line our data will continue to grow and I believe we are near the bottom of the curve.

Data is there and we need to deal with it. The consumers of RAID storage have few choices. Sure we can archive more, tape is great but we all question reliability. Primary storage can be cost prohibitave. So we must look to secondary storage.

Sunstar works with storage manufacturers such as NexSAN, iQStoar and Arena and thes folks tend to fucus on primarily SATA II storage, thus the secondary tier of storage.

As for tape - LTO, IBM and the StorageTek line are still popular - but now for archive purposes.

Please conatc Sunstar if we can be of assistance.
800.663-5523 info@sunstarco.com
Gavin

RAID Levels

RAID = Redundant Array of Independent Discs.
A RAID system is a collection of hard drives joined together using a RAID level definition.

• RAID can be used to stripe drives together to give more overall access speed (level 0).
• RAID can be used to mirror drives (level 1).
• RAID can be used to increase uptime of your overall storage by striping drives together and then keeping parity data, if a drive should fail the system keeps operating (level 5 or 6).

RAID levels 5 and 6 are most commonly used, primarily for uptime purposes and its ability to join together (say) 14 drives, giving a large storage block.

Read about RAID levels below and for more detailed information visit the specific RAID Education page on our site at Sunstar Company, Inc.

• Level 0
  Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.
• Level 1
  Mirroring and Duplexing: Provides disk mirroring. Level 1 provides twice the read transaction rate of single disks and the same write transaction rate as single disks.
• Level 2
  Error-Correcting Coding: Rarely used, with data striped at the bit level rather than the block level.
• Level 3
  Bit-Interleaved Parity: Provides byte-level striping with a dedicated parity disk. Rarely used as it cannot service simultaneous multiple requests.
• Level 4
  Dedicated Parity Drive: A commonly used implementation of RAID, Level 4 provides block-level striping (like Level 0) with a parity disk. If a data disk fails, the parity data is used to create a replacement disk. A disadvantage to Level 4 is that the parity disk can create write bottlenecks.
• Level 5
  Block Interleaved Distributed Parity: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Possibly the most popular implementations of RAID.
• Level 6
  Independent Data Disks with Double Parity: Provides block-level striping with parity data distributed across all disks. Very popular at this time.
• Level 0+1
  A Mirror of Stripes: Not one of the original RAID levels, two RAID 0 stripes are created, and a RAID 1 mirror is created over them. Used for both replicating and sharing data among disks.
• Level 10
  A Stripe of Mirrors: Not one of the original RAID levels, multiple RAID 1 mirrors are created, and a RAID 0 stripe is created over these.

Please feel free to contact us at Sunstar Company at: info@sunstarco.com or 800.663.5523

Many Thanks

Gavin

www.sunstarco.com