RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of several hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the info which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file properly and to validate the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information you upload to your cloud web hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this specific hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a defective disk is replaced, the info which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which our company offers are made on physical servers that take advantage of SSD drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is added to the information cloned on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the correct info is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will stay online because all the info will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the info will be stored on standard disk drives that also operate in RAID since we would like to make sure that any sort of website content you upload will be safe and sound at all times. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.