New RAID-5 Backup Servers

We have almost completed development of our new RAID-5 backup servers and plan on deploying them soon. I wanted to touch on a few key points about our new servers and also explain a little bit about how they work and why they are better than most other RAID solutions.

We were originally planning on using RAID-1 for our servers because we liked the idea of having two drives mirroring each other in case one of them failed. However, after further investigation, we found that in order to have a lot of backup space available on each server, it was quite complex to set it up this way. In other words, we found that we needed to have multiple RAID configurations in each server.

The solution we came up with was to use RAID-5 instead but with a hot spare. The hot spare is just an additional drive that remains on standby in case one of the working drives fail.

To help explain the added redundancy, I will first explain what RAID-5 is. A RAID-5 server has an array of hard drives which looks like one giant hard drive. If one of the hard drives fails, no data is lost and the other drives compensate until you replace the drive. But with our hot spare drive, the new drive automatically, and immediately, come online and take over for the failing drive.

The beauty of this solution is that even if the backup server has a drive failure, a new one automatically comes online and takes it place. If then a second hard drive fails before we replace the old one, the backup server still continues to function without data-loss.

We know that we have taken the extra step in protecting your data with our new servers and are confident that it will be as reliable as it gets and probably even more so than our competition.

We are looking forward to deploying our new servers soon!