Robin Harris looks into the reasons why RAID is not anymore a viable or at least growing technology and how fountain/rateless erasure codes solutions could replace it delivering better replication than the usually 3x type of replication we see in the NoSQL space.

The post-RAID (noRAID) era has begun. While RAID arrays aren’t going away, the growth is elsewhere, and corporate investment follows growth.

Original title and link: The Post-RAID Era Begins (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://storagemojo.com/2012/07/23/the-post-raid-era-has-begun/

Acunu guys explain one piece of their distribution of Apache Cassandra:

our product […] uses a layout known as Randomised Duplicate Allocation (RDA).  In the 2-RDA mode, each block of data is duplicated, and the 2 copies allocated at random among the available devices (other schemes can use more than 2 copies, or a variable number of copies depending on the popularity of the data and space constraints).

As opposed to what’s happening in the Hadoop world, Acunu is not just repackaging Cassandra:

The Acunu Core (“Castle”) is at the heart of our distribution for Apache Cassandra. It comprises a rewrite of the Linux storage stack that offloads much of the storage work from Cassandra. […] It includes optimized OS caching and buffering schemes, new storage algorithms with direct access to disks, SSD-aware storage layout algorithms (coming in V2) and an alternative RAID scheme that rebuilds 2TB disks in 30 minutes.

Original title and link: RAID and Acunu Randomised Duplicate Allocation Disk Layout (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.acunu.com/blogs/dr-andrew-byde/faster-disk-rebuilds/