Paper Title: Life After RAID: Big Data Requires a Better Approach

Paper Abstract: RAID has become a standard way of protecting data integrity. The various RAID levels provide many options for data centers to use with a wide range of cost/performance tradeoffs. However, traditional RAID is no longer capable of handling centers' needs now that data stores in the petabyte range are commonplace. Rebuild times have become way too long, and capacity requirements have become far too large. Furthermore, triple replication simply takes too much space to be economically feasible. The solution is erasure coding, which can survive more disk failures than RAID while using only a fraction of the space of triple replication. It allows users to keep rebuild times and storage costs under control for today's big data applications and for the zettabyte future.

Paper Author: Mike McWhorter, Senior Technologist, Western Digital

Author Bio: Mike McWhorter is a senior technologist at Western Digital. He specializes in performance tuning and storage optimization for big data customers with a focus on testing and benchmarking applications, and optimizing them for a variety of storage technologies. He has almost 20 years of experience in the technology industry and has emphasized the deployment of flash memory arrays in enterprise applications. He has published many technical articles and holds a patent for a forensic data transfer algorithm. McWhorter received a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Longwood University in Virginia. He is a frequent blogger on big data issues.