ABSTRACT
Each form of data storage protection has its own benefits and its own potential downfalls, especially with increased storage capacities and businesses needing to offer 24 × 7 services with high-performance characteristics. The data protection techniques belong to the fault-tolerance aspect of the FARR model. During the discussion on RAID, keep in mind that RAID serves only as data storage protection—it is not a means of protecting against corruption, loss of availability, user error, or deliberate data erasure. Location-aware encoding mechanisms increase resiliency by ensuring the loss of a single node does not cause data loss, even though a node may have anywhere between a few drives and dozens of drives. This allows for a configuration designed to “scale out,” into up to even the exabyte range, while being highly fault tolerant—particularly when geo-distribution of encoded objects is added to the equation.
