RAID and Storage Solutions

This video will look at a number of different storage solutions. Check out http://YouTube.com/ITFreeTraining or http://itfreetraining.com for more of our always free training videos. These include software and hardware based systems. A storage solution is a system that allows more drives to be combined together for performance or redundancy reasons.

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What's in this video
The following storage solutions will be looked at in this video.
Software vs Hardware: The advantages to using hardware over a software solution.
JBOD: Just a bunch of disks. Allows different sized drives to be combined together to form the one drive.
Spanning: Allows multiple drives to be combined of different sizes.
RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks is a system that allows multiple drives to be combined to form the one drive.
Windows Storage Spaces: This is a new system implemented in Windows Server 2012 that allows multiple drives to be combined together.
Logical Volume Manager: Is an alternative storage system used by operating systems like Linux.

Software vs Hardware
Hardware based systems typically cost more than a software solution as software solutions usually come with the operating system free of charge. A lot of motherboards now come with free hardware based solutions. You will find that if you purchase a server this may come with some hardware based solutions. Some servers may require additional hardware in the server or a higher model may need to be purchased to gain access to some hardware based solutions. The biggest advantage of a hardware solutions is that the operating system sees the drive as a single physical drive. This means the operating system can be booted from this drive. Some software based solutions do not support booting of the operating system. Software solutions may also support some additional features not supported by hardware. For example a software based solutions may allow for multiple files containing the same data to use the same physical space on the drive. Enterprise hardware solutions will often offer additional features as well but do cost more. For example, enterprise hardware solutions will have a web interface allowing access to additional features.

JBOD
Just a Bunch of Disks allows multiple drives to be combined together. This includes different sized drives and different types. For example you could combine solid state drives and mechanical drives together. JBOD does not offer any performance increase and if one of the drives was to fail you would lose all the data on all the drives.

Spanning
Spanning is similar to JBOD however it combines free space on multiple drives together into the one drive. The advantage of spanning is that it allows space that may have otherwise been lost to be used. Spanning does not provide any speed advantages and also does not offer any redundancy. If a drive that is used in spanning was lost, then all the data in the spanned set would be lost.

RAID
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks is a system which allows multiple drives to be combined together to form the one drive. The drives need to be the same size in order to be used. If one drive is larger than the others, typically it still can be used, however the extra space will be left unused. Depending on which RAID solution is used will determine if there are any redundancy or speed advantages. The more expensive RAID solutions may allow drives to be added to the RAID, increasing the amount of space in the RAID. A lot of RAID solutions do not offer this feature and thus if you want to change the size of the RAID you need to destroy the RAID and recreate it.

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References
"Installing and Configuring Windows Server 2012 Exam Ref 70-410" pg 49-55
"RAID" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
"Nested RAID levels" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_R...
"Step-by-step for Storage Spaces Tiering in Windows Server 2012 R2" http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/ar...
"Logical Volume Manager (Linux)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_...)

Видео RAID and Storage Solutions канала itfreetraining