[Beowulf] Storage - the end of RAID?

[Ellis H. Wilson III]

On 10/29/10 13:18, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 05:42:39PM +0100, Hearns, John wrote:
>
>> Quite a perceptive article on ZDnet
>>
>> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/the-end-of-raid/1154?tag=nl.e539
>
> This has been going on for a long time.  Blekko has 5 petabytes of
> disk, and no RAID anywhere. RAID went out with SQL. Kinda funny that
> HPC is slower to abandon RAID than other kinds of computing...

I think it's making a pretty wild assumption to say search engines and 
HPC have the same I/O needs (and thus can use the same I/O setups).  If 
RAID isn't gone from the domain, there is probably a pretty good reason 
for it.  Also, I'd be blown away if Blekko wasn't doing it's own 
striping/redundancy - even if they aren't using RAID 0 or 1 by the book, 
they probably are using the same concepts (though hand-spun for search 
engine needs).  I don't think the "whole internet" takes up 5 petabytes, 
so they probably have a couple copies for redundancy and performance or 
heterogeneous disk arrays to service more/less accessed items on the net.

ellis