Redundant Storage Hardware Components are the Key to a Downtime-Free Experience

 

Most enterprise downtime is caused by ransomware attacks. Right? Not really. Several statistics suggest that the #1 cause of enterprise downtime is hardware failure. Therefore, it’s important to use data storage infrastructure with redundant key hardware components to make sure your business or data center doesn’t experience downtime.

How often do Business Experience Downtime due to Hardware Failure?

How common is it for a business to experience downtime due to its servers crashing or a drive failing? It’s actually pretty common.

This is one of the reasons why businesses have backups.

Even if you have a really expensive data storage infrastructure, if it has single point-of-failure, then you’re putting important business data at risk. All it’ll take for your business to experience downtime is a single drive failure or a power supply failing.

Therefore, it’s very important to remove single point-of-failures from your data storage infrastructures. This is true for NAS storage appliances, SAN appliances, Unified appliances, and hyperconverged infrastructures.

How can your enterprise resist and reduce enterprise storage downtime?

There are several ways to do so. One of them is to have redundant key hardware components in your data storage infrastructure.

Hardware & Software Redundancy – It’s Important

There are several data storage vendors who offer reliable NAS appliances, SAN appliances, and other data storage infrastructure with redundant hardware components.

It needs to be mentioned here that when we talk about redundancy, we don’t just mean redundant power supplies. Although that’s important, there’s more to redundancy than just redundant power supplies.

What else needs to be redundant in a data storage infrastructure?

One of the necessary components of a reliable data storage infrastructure are RAID and / or erasure coding.

While power supplies offer users an alternative that keeps functioning in the event of power supply failure, RAID and erasure coding protect from drive failure.

How many drives can fail before you experience downtime depends on a number of factors. Some of them are:

·        RAID level (0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50, and 60)

·        Available memory for RAID

·        Processor

Erasure coding acts as software RAID and serves the purpose of redundancy and fault-tolerance. The better usage of erasure coding is when there are multiple appliance nodes within a system.

So RAID, erasure coding, and redundant power supplies can help reduce downtime? They can help but completely remove the possibility of downtime? No.

Another hardware architecture that helps keep downtime in check is disaggregated infrastructure. Disaggregated infrastructure distributes hardware components in separate hardware chassis and provides multi-path access to storage resources.

This adds redundancy and helps remove bottlenecks too.

Disaggregated infrastructure is one of the latest approaches introduced by storage vendors like HPE, Dell, and StoneFly.

Conclusion

Businesses need to setup data storage infrastructure with redundant hardware components. Otherwise, they’re susceptible to enterprise downtime.

RAID, erasure coding, redundant power supplies, and disaggregated infrastructure are some of the ways data center owners can help reduce the possibility of downtime with enterprise data storage infrastructure.