SOFTWARE SOLUTION BRIEF
ADAPT: Rapid-Rebuild Technology
TECHNOLOGY PAPER
Does more data mean less performance?
Since innovation is at the heart of Seagate's mission, we never stop fine-tuning the software that powers the Seagate® Nytro® X and Exos!" X systems. It means that we can provide our customers with the features they need to keep their data safe and accessible where and when they need it. That's why we developed ADAPT data protection technology. ADAPT Autonomic Distributed Allocation Protection
Technology is Seagate's next-generation erasure encoding solution. It replaces traditional RAID types with a protection scheme that distributes the parity across a larger set of HDDs or SSDs. The upshots?
Data protection is now available at a capacity higher than ever before with rebuilds that are up to 95%
faster than with traditional solutions. With ADAPT, system administrators will find scalability, flexibility,
and infrastructure that is easier to maintain and expand. This white paper provides an overview of this software feature and highlights its key features and benefits.
How Capacity Affects Data Protection
Enterprises today rely more heavily than ever on data from the data that drives their daily operations to the data that provides actionable information to create a competitive advantage in their industry. They also rely on evolving technology to keep that data safe and accessible, even during routine downtimes or in the event of unforeseen system failures.
According to Technik.net, the advent of RAID array solutions initially solved the data downtime problem:
More and more organizations have created enterprise-wide networks to improve productivity and streamline information flow. While the distributed data stored on network servers provides substantial cost benefits, these savings can be quickly offset if information is frequently lost or becomes inaccessible. As today's applications create larger files, network storage needs have increased proportionally. In addition, accelerating CPU speeds have outstripped data transfer rates to storage media, creating bottlenecks in today's systems.By integrating multiple drives into a single array which is viewed by the network operating system as a single disk drive organizations can create cost-effective, mini computer-sized solutions of up to a terabyte or more of storage.
However, RAID technology was optimized for use in environments with limited or finite storage capacity.
Now companies are rapidly implementing storage solutions with very high capacity potential, and they are eager to leverage the same level of protection they've come to expect from RAID.
But with traditional RAID types, the overall system performance can slow down dramatically during rebuilds when storage capacity increases. This is because data is striped across multiple drives along with parity information. If a drive in a RAID set fails, the controllers use the parity information to help
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ADAPT: Rapid-Rebuild Technology
reconstruct the data from a failed drive on a spare drive. Unfortunately, the speed at which the system can be rebuilt is tied to the performance of a single HDD, in some instances amounting to over 50 hours.
Today's high-capacity systems require new technology to replace data protection schemes that were developed based on much
lower-capacity systems.
But what if that rebuild could be distributed to many drives in a RAID system and get the cumulative performance boost of multiple
