Title: Some notes on fault tolerant storage systems
Tags: english, sysadmin, raid
-Date: 2017-11-01 15:30
+Date: 2017-11-01 15:35
<p>If you care about how fault tolerant your storage is, you might
find these articles and papers interesting. They have formed how I
Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi
H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
-
<li>ZDNet
<a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/">Why
RAID 5 stops working in 2009</a> by Robin Harris</li>
<li>USENIX FAST'08
<a href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/bairavasundaram/bairavasundaram_html/">An
-cAnalysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack</a> -
+Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack</a> by
L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, B. Schroeder, A. C.
Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
<li>SIGMETRICS 2007
<a href="http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/latent-sigmetrics07.pdf">An
-analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives</a> -
+analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives</a> by
L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, S. Pasupathy, and J. Schindler</li>
</ul>
<p>Several of these research papers are based on data collected from
hundred thousands or millions of disk, and their findings are eye
opening. The short story is simply do not implicitly trust RAID or
-redundant storage systems. Details matter.</p>
+redundant storage systems. Details matter. And unfortunately there
+are few options on Linux addressing all the identified issues. Both
+ZFS and Btrfs are doing a fairly good job, but have legal and
+practical issues on their own. I wonder how cluster file systems like
+Ceph do in this regard. After all, there is an old saying, you know
+you have a distributed system when the crash of a computer you have
+never heard of stops you from getting any work done. The same holds
+true if fault tolerance do not work.</p>
+
+<p>Just remember, in the end, it do not matter how redundant, or how
+fault tolerant your storage is, if you do not continuously monitor its
+status to detect and replace failed disks.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>