RAIN–EC

Advanced Data Protection Technology — Much More Reliable than RAID

The RAIN–EC technology delivered in Permabit Enterprise Archive™ represents a fundamentally new solution for data protection for grid storage architectures, designed from the ground up for the unique challenges of a multi petabyte–scale archive. RAIN–EC is 1,000 times more robust than RAID 6 and allows for reliable deployment of petabyte–scale systems without fear of data loss. The RAIN–EC data protection solution makes more efficient use of space; 50% less capacity is required for data protection purposes compared to mirroring technology, significantly reducing the total cost per terabyte of usable storage.

Erasure Coding for Secure Data Protection

RAIN–EC introduces the ability to recover from any number of failures that simultaneously affect two different storage nodes. This new class of data protection solutions is based on Erasure Coding technology.

“Erasure coding” describes the class of algorithms that break data into chunks and creates additional chunks so that the original data can be recovered even if some subset of the chunks are lost. Parity, for instance, is one of the very simplest data protection techniques – but only allows one chunk to be lost. Mirroring, single–parity, and even double–parity techniques as used with RAID 6 are limited in capability and were not designed for massive scalability.

Permabit invented and patented a class of erasure codes that are both extremely fast and allow recovery from multiple failed drives or nodes. Combined with Permabit’s storage grid architecture, RAIN–EC allows scalability to petabytes of storage while delivering rebuild times many times faster than RAID, protection against failure of any component of the system, and delivers the flexibility to add and remove storage components at any time without disruption.

Robustness against uncorrectable read errors protects the system against the most common cause of data loss with RAID technologies and allows RAIN–EC systems to safely make use of the terabyte and larger drives necessary to deliver cost–effective archive storage. Only RAIN–EC delivers today the trillion hour MTBF that large–scale, disk–based archives demand.

Permabit Features:

• Built–in: RAIN–EC is a standard feature in the Permabit Enterprise Archive. There are no additional licenses, software, or hardware to purchase.

• Patented Erasure Coding: Enables Permabit to provide scalable data protection solutions to the multiple–petabyte level and is uniquely employed in Permabit Enterprise Archive.

• Intelligent Recovery™: 1,000 times more reliable than RAID 6 and designed for next generation large capacity (terabytes) disk drives using advanced Erasure Coding algorithms.

• Simultaneous Failure Recovery: Can survive multiple simultaneous failures (multiple drives, power, CPU, memory, etc.) without data loss.

• Intelligent Recovery™: As drive capacities continue to expand, the likelyhood of multiple simultaneous drive failures increases. In the event of multiple drive failures, RAIN–EC Intelligent Recovery automatically and transparently identifies and restores redundancy to any unprotected data first.

• Uncorrectable Read Error Recovery: Robust recovery from uncorrectable read errors protects against most common cause of data loss with RAID.

• Fast Data Rebuild: Recovery from failed drives is dramatically faster than RAID based technologies.

• Massively Scalable: Patented technology allows RAIN–EC to scale across an entire storage grid making it the most scalable data deduplication–based archive in the industry.

• Seamless Growth: Storage capacity can be added one storage module at a time without ever having to take the system down.

• Mix and Match: Today’s storage technology can work with future storage technology without ever having to perform a forklift upgrade.

• Low Overhead: Requires 50% less disk capacity overhead compared to mirroring technology.