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