I notice Xiotech are running around the place claiming an industry first by using eight extra bits added to 512 byte sectors to eliminate silent corruption.
It's a pity that they didn't read this blog post by Steve Todd or they'd have seen the following.
I mentioned in my last post that it's my belief that CLARiiON's continued growth in the RAID industry was a result of fundamental decisions made in the 80s. You know, back when RAID was relevant.
So here's the first decision we made: we grew the on-disk sector size from 512 bytes to 520. And do you know what we put in those extra eight bytes? That's right. DIBs. (Zillanote: Data Integrity Bits for those too lazy to click the link)
Every single block of data ever written to a CLARiiON has got DIBs. Protection for customer data is interspersed with the data itself.
So like Clariion has been doing this since day 0 way back at the dawn of RAID 5 in the early 90's. Maybe they thought none of us would remember?
Hey Steve, the team is only 14 years ahead of the competition when it comes to ensuring data integrity. Well, you knew someone was going to rip off the idea eventually so it's better late than never. Though I think the 14 years worth of testing and continuous refinement still gives DIBs an advantage.
Maybe now we can have the conversation about who isn't ensuring the data read back is that which was written?
The list of guilty parties is as long as your arm.
