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Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Enterprise storage / The Prime Directive of Storage: Do Not Lose Data

The Prime Directive of Storage: Do Not Lose Data

December 12, 2014 By Stephen Leave a Comment

People call on storage devices and systems to do lots of things, from accelerating I/O to copying and sharing data. But at the heart of it all, storage arrays really have just one job: Do not lose data!

You Had One Job Do Not Lose Data

That’s right. Storage really only needs to store data. Nothing fancy; nothing exotic. I give you data, you give it back. Everything else you can do for me is gravy.

Back in my day storage was just storage

That’s why I’m always amazed when I hear about new storage arrays that do exotic things. You have to start with the basics before you can get crazy with my data. How are you going to guarantee you don’t lose it if a drive fails? What about two? How about if the power goes out? What about unrecoverable read errors that sneak past CRC?

One Does Not Simple Return 0 Instead of 1

It’s actually not easy to build a reliable storage system that guarantees data integrity. It takes some serious engineering to work around all the ways you can lose data. And yet if your system can’t do that, I wouldn’t trust it do do anything else exotic!

Im watching you

Keep this in mind storage companies: I’m watching you!

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Filed Under: Enterprise storage, Everything, Features Tagged With: data protection, enterprise storage, meme, storage, Truth in Storage

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