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Table Of Contents

Storage Concepts and Technologies

There are various RAID levels (or ways to define how the disks work together) that provide

one or more of the following benefits:

• Increased data integrity

• Fault-tolerance

• Improved Read and/or Write throughput or capacity

Consider the RAID levels that will be most beneficial for the business. Linksys NSS products

offer data protection through internal RAID. NSS devices support RAID Levels: 0, 1,

1+Spare, 5, 5+Spare, 10, and JBOD. You can configure the NSS boxes to have two (2)

independent disk RAID Arrays (e.g. RAID0/1/JBOD).

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Note

From an end-user perspective, the RAID array appears as a single data repository instead

of multiple individual hard drives. Administrators may assign multiple volumes with

different levels of accessibility to the array.

RAID types should be carefully chosen according to business resiliency requirements. The

decision is generally based upon a trade-off between expense and features (e.g. performance,

fault-tolerance and data integrity), and the applications for which the array is storing

information. While there is no single correct RAID level for any application, some basic

design considerations may be helpful:

• Some type of data integrity/fault-tolerance is generally desired. This requires that one

of the parity or mirroring RAID types should be considered. For example, RAID 1

creates two complete copies of your data. Disk drives are very reliable devices, but

they do fail. Having two complete copies of data ensures that the business continues

with minimal disruption.

• Applications with real-time requirements, such as video surveillance and database

lookup, may benefit from RAID types with improved disk read and disk write

performance that are generally found in striping solutions. As such, RAID 5 and

RAID 10 configurations should be among those considered.

• RAID 0 is not for business use, unless your business is video editing or an

environment where you always keep a copy of your data in a safe place, and you need

the very highest performance and your file sizes are large.

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Note

In their default configuration (out of the box), NSS4100 and NSS6100 systems

include a RAID 5 configuration across four (4) 250GB drives.

Virtualization, which allows multiple RAID sets to be exported to a master NSS, can be used

to aggregate multiple fault-tolerant RAID sets into a single JBOD architecture. This can

simplify user operations by allowing all users to access a single “virtual” set, while enabling

a scalable and fault-tolerant architecture to be deployed.

The number of RAID level implementations is continuously changing as new methods and

combinations of methods are developed and the technologies continue to improve. The

following sections provide a brief overview of the RAID levels supported by the Linksys NSS

series of NAS and their advantages and disadvantages.

10 EDCS-593805 v1.0

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