Fault tolerance, using replication and redundancy to maintain data integrity, has evolved considerably since its inception and promises to continuously develop at an even clip. With data having taken over from hardware components as the backbone of the IT industry, data reliability is a key issue in today’s systems.

The concept of Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) aimed at ensuring data integrity has been around for some time now but, with rapid advancements being made in technology everyday, assumes greater significance today than at any other time. Progressive development in disk technologies coupled with reducing costs of hard disks has made RAID even more useful and prevalent in today’s IT scenario.

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Future of RAID systems runs parallel to the future of storage; the short-term solution to increasing storage capacity is to add more storage boxes. However, with storage volumes doubling every year or two, this solution is hardly going to be popular in space-starved server rooms or with customers of hosting providers who charge by the rack unit. Nor will the accounts department be happy if the cost of buying storage doubles every year. Consequently, vendors of disk, tape, and optical storage devices have roughly kept pace with the growth of storage by increasing storage density – the amount of stuff that can be stored in the same amount of space – at approximately the same rate. The per-megabyte price of storage has also been keeping its end of the bargain, halving in about the same time as storage needs and storage capacities double. But there are questions whether this exponential increase in density can continue for much longer before it reaches some fundamental limits. So what are these limits and what technologies will replace tape, disk, and optical when they run out of steam?

According to storage industry experts the line between storage and networking has blurred.

Future of RAID

RAID configurations for the future will focus on aspects such as reduced latency, increased throughput, less cabling, and simplifying implementation. Of course, the fundamental trade-off between cost and capacity against performance and reliability will remain as true in the future as it is today.

With the exponential improvements in technology we see everyday, low latency and high throughput for future RAID systems is almost assured. However, tightening the integration and implementation procedures will most likely to be crucial factor for tomorrow’s complex RAID configurations. The shape and size of RAID systems is also undergoing a makeover these days, with the introduction of ‘sleek’, ‘ultra-slim’, ‘rack-mountable’, etc arrays.

More and more RAID systems are also getting ‘virtual’ – a concept that is rapidly catching on. Virtualization is expanding RAID from being a disk-based concept to an object-based concept. An example of this is placing data parity into individual files/folders. What this will translate to is having redundant data in the midst of non-redundant data! Another RAID implementation gaining ground is that of a ‘storage grid’ in which multiple RAID nodes are linked together into a much larger storage system – this is popularly know as RAID or Redundant array of Independent Nodes (very useful in multiple servers).

However, not everything is progressive for tomorrow’s RAID systems. This era is seeing an increased usage of SATA disks, and the probability of two SATA disks failing is much more than for Fiber Channel or SCSI (To counter 2 disks failing at the same time, some RAID implementations use DP or Double Parity). Moreover, with increased disk storage capacities, RAID will take a performance hit with the rebuild time increasing significantly.

So the future of storage and RAID systems are looking forward for something on the not-too-distant horizon which is called perpendicular recording, where we have the bits stand on end perpendicular to the surface of the disk, and we can get a higher aerial density that way and pretty good raw data rates. That’s probably two to four years out at least. That may also lend itself to a thing called 3D recording where you go multiple layers of vertical bits, and you may or may not even have to spin the disk.”

Present and future of RAID w.r.t. our Data Recovery Software Companies

In keeping with the advances being made in the development of RAID systems, Data Recovery Software companies of the future will focus upon the following aspects of their software:

Enhanced error detection, correction, and reporting modules

Versatile recovery capabilities to contend with increasingly complex RAID configurations

Improved file recognition capabilities to counter file fragmentation which is bound to occur with the complex RAID systems of tomorrow (contrary to popular belief, while RAID systems increase data I/O and reliability, they also fall prey to file fragmentation)

‘Intelligent’ tools to deal with the increasingly popular shared file systems (where data may be stored locally or remotely)

Networking capabilities for the slow but sure convergence of NAS and SAN technologies

Additional modules for the increasingly popular fiber-channel based arrays ‘Faster’ algorithms to handle ever increasing disk capacities

With RAID systems becoming ubiquitous today, data protection levels are at an all time high. With the rate of technological advances we see today, the day is not far when data will be said to be 100% secure against any possible data disaster.