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What is RAID-F?

RAID over File System (RAID-F) is a highly scalable, amazingly flexible, and smart storage system that operates over existing file systems and turns independent hard drives of various sizes, makes, and models into one massive parity-protected storage pool. Storage pools can in-turn be aggregated into a storage cloud. RAID-F is primarily focused on Snapshot parity data protection with support for RAID4, RAID6, and RAIDX, where X is any number of tolerances desired. Parity data protection can be configured at the storage pool level and/or at the storage cloud level. RAID-F also has experimental support for Real-Time data protection, which works well for a limited number of deployment scenarios but needs more work to support additional deployment profiles. When used for Snapshot RAID, the Snapshot RAID protection can used independently of the Storage Pooling feature and vice versa.   Furthermore, RAID-F is not limited to hard disks as it can pool data from all accessible sources including removable media, external storage, network shares, LUNs, disk arrays, etc.   Key features:
  • The best RAID engines in the industry and the only solution to support RAID infinity
  • Data centric, not Drive/Device centric (any data, any size, anywhere)
  • Supports both Snapshot and Real-Time parity data protection
  • Supports creating and expanding a storage pool with volumes/devices containing existing data
  • Provides the greatest data safety possible and the lowest risk of data loss (*)
  • Provides massive energy saving features (**)
  • Multi-platforms support: RAID-F runs on Windows, Linux and WHS
(*) Failure beyond the tolerance level will result only in partial data loss unlike all other solutions in the market which would result in complete data loss (**) Allows drives to spin down: only the drive/device containing the accessed data will need to be activated when reading/writing to a storage pool   Please read Understanding the limitations of Snapshot RAID for additional pertinent information.  
 

RAID-F Storage Pooling and RAID Features

For more details on those features, check out those articles: - Storage Pooling in FlexRAID - RAID Engines in FlexRAID

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May 14, 2013 @ 13:40:40Current Revision
Content
RAID over File System (RAID-F) is a highly scalable and smart storage system that operates over existing file systems and turns independent hard drives of various sizes, makes, and models into one massive parity-protected storage pool.  RAID over File System (RAID-F) is a highly scalable, amazingly flexible, and smart storage system that operates over existing file systems and turns independent hard drives of various sizes, makes, and models into one massive parity-protected storage pool.
Storage pools can in-turn be aggregated into a storage cloud. Storage pools can in-turn be aggregated into a storage cloud.
RAID-F provides both snapshot and real-time parity data protection with support for RAID4, RAID6, and RAIDX, where X is any number of tolerances desired. Parity data protection can be configured at the storage pool level and/or at the storage cloud level.  RAID-F is primarily focused on Snapshot parity data protection with support for RAID4, RAID6, and RAIDX, where X is any number of tolerances desired. Parity data protection can be configured at the storage pool level and/or at the storage cloud level.
  RAID-F also has experimental support for Real-Time data protection, which works well for a limited number of deployment scenarios but needs more work to support additional deployment profiles.
  When used for Snapshot RAID, the Snapshot RAID protection can used independently of the Storage Pooling feature and vice versa.
   
Furthermore, RAID-F is not limited to hard disks as it can pool data from all accessible sources including removable media, external storage, network shares, LUNs, disk arrays, etc. Furthermore, RAID-F is not limited to hard disks as it can pool data from all accessible sources including removable media, external storage, network shares, LUNs, disk arrays, etc.
   
<b>Key features:</b> <b>Key features:</b>
<ul> <ul>
<li>The best RAID engines in the industry and the only solution to support RAID infinity</li> <li>The best RAID engines in the industry and the only solution to support RAID infinity</li>
<li>Data centric, not Drive/Device centric (any data, any size, anywhere)</li> <li>Data centric, not Drive/Device centric (any data, any size, anywhere)</li>
<li>Supports both Snapshot and Real-Time parity data protection</li> <li>Supports both Snapshot and Real-Time parity data protection</li>
<li>Supports creating and expanding a storage pool with volumes/devices containing existing data</li> <li>Supports creating and expanding a storage pool with volumes/devices containing existing data</li>
<li>Provides the greatest data safety possible and the lowest risk of data loss (*)</li> <li>Provides the greatest data safety possible and the lowest risk of data loss (*)</li>
<li>Provides massive energy saving features (**)</li> <li>Provides massive energy saving features (**)</li>
<li>Multi-platforms support: RAID-F runs on Windows, Linux and WHS</li> <li>Multi-platforms support: RAID-F runs on Windows, Linux and WHS</li>
</ul> </ul>
(*) Failure beyond the tolerance level will result only in partial data loss unlike all other solutions in the market which would result in complete data loss (*) Failure beyond the tolerance level will result only in partial data loss unlike all other solutions in the market which would result in complete data loss
(**) Allows drives to spin down: only the drive/device containing the accessed data will need to be activated when reading/writing to a storage pool (**) Allows drives to spin down: only the drive/device containing the accessed data will need to be activated when reading/writing to a storage pool
  &nbsp;
  Please read <a href="http:// wiki.flexraid.com/2011/10/ 18/understanding- the-limitations- of-snapshot-raid/ ">Understanding the limitations of Snapshot RAID</a> for additional pertinent information.
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<hr> <hr>
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<h1>RAID-F Storage Pooling and RAID Features</h1> <h1>RAID-F Storage Pooling and RAID Features</h1>
For more details on those features, check out those articles: For more details on those features, check out those articles:
- <a href="http:// wiki.flexraid.com/ ?p=85">RAID-F's Storage Pooling</a>  
  - <a href="http:// wiki.flexraid.com/ about/flexraid- storage-pooling/">Storage Pooling in FlexRAID</a>
- <a href="http:// wiki.flexraid.com/ ?p=670">RAID-F's RAID Engines</a>  - <a href="http:// wiki.flexraid.com/about/raid- engines/">RAID Engines in FlexRAID</a>

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2 Responses to “What is RAID-F?”

  1. GINO October 27, 2014 at 4:28 AM #

    but i don’t understand.., the disks are striped or no ? are jobs , mirrored, but no striped ?
    people need stripe of disks for best perfomance , not big size with the performance of a disk at time,
    can do this your software ?

    thankss

    Reply
  2. GINO October 27, 2014 at 1:45 PM #

    ahh now have see a beautiful thinks.. : NZFS’s tRAID
    this is what we need !!!

    Reply

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