ABSTRACT
Reliability and Data Integrity (T10-PI) is an industry standard that solves a very real problem: end-to-end data protection. T10-PI has the potential to solve that problem better, solve it more cheaply, and make end-to-end data protection much more widely spread. The additional data integrity data, at a later time, is read off the drive and rechecked once the data gets to the requesting server. This approach, in which the data integrity information is kept with the actual data from start to finish, addresses a real problem of silent data corruption. Without this approach, data integrity wrappers are kept with the data every step of the way, but at each step along the way, the wrapper is added, data is transported, the wrapper is checked then stripped away; resulting in multiple instances where a data packet is stored without a check-sum or similar. Silent data corruption does not happen in a widespread, highly visible way, but it does happen.
