Transforming parity drives into data drives
NZFS RAID implementations that use dedicated parity have a pretty neat feature which is to transform parity drives into data drives when the RAID is degraded.
This feature is available to the Transparent RAID feature too.
A RAID is said to be degraded when it has lost a [...]
I recently spent some time reading on hard drive forensic and then looked at various commercial offerings for secure drive erase.
The cost of some of those solutions really intrigued me by being so pricey.
As always, this got my curiosity from an implementation standpoint.
So, I read… read… and read some more.
Indeed.
If you are still confused about NZFS, you are rightfully so confused.
Much of NZFS and how it stacks up against ZFS has not yet been revealed.
The only thing discussed so far has been Transparent RAID (tRAID) which is a byproduct of NZFS’s RAID stack.
Basically, tRAID [...]
With NZFS getting closer to a release and discussions already starting around it, there is still a bit of confusion on how it relates to FlexRAID’s RAID-F technology and vice-versa.
In this post http://www.openegg.org/2012/02/22/flexraid-vs-nzfs/, I provided a brief overview.
I am now going to take another stab a clarifying the two products.
Clean up [...]
What does NZFS stand for?
NZFS stands for “Next-Generation Zion File System”.
A Zion is an imaginary place considered to be perfect or ideal.
What is NZFS?
NZFS is a data storage virtualization technology.
It is an extremely flexible framework that allows to you achieve the followings without additional cost:
Optimal storage capacity [...]
I have been approached by a number of users all confused about the state and future of FlexRAID in light of the upcoming NZFS.
First, I need to do some clean up on the naming of the products.
FlexRAID:
FlexRAID is a concept and not a product in itself. The core essence [...]
In my original design, NZFS consisted of a minimal kernel mode driver with the bulk of the processing happening in user mode.
The motivations were quite simple: kernel mode development is a major pain in the ass and everywhere else! So, avoid it!
On top of being very restricted resource wise, one must [...]
RAID users are well familiar with this: scrubbing.
For those who don’t, scrubbing is a full data scan to check on it integrity. Virtually every RAID implementation relies on scrubbing as part of its maintenance to ensure continuous data integrity.
In FlexRAID’s existing implementations, scrubbing is implemented through the Validate and Verify/Force-Sync-Verify tasks.
For [...]
Get it? NZFS (Not ZFS) similar to GNU (GNU Not UNIX)…
With the recent announcement of Storage Spaces by MS, it was clear that FlexRAID needed to step up in order to stay ahead of everyone in the storage pooling space.
The current FlexRAID implementation of storage pooling has several key advantages over everything [...]
I get asked quite often why the heading for FlexRAID states “Storage data management” as opposed to “Data storage management”.
Well, FlexRAID concerns itself with the data and not the storage. Hence it concerns itself with storage data (data that is stored) as opposed to transactional/transient data (data that is not stored).
Data storage management [...]
