Moore was initially noting the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit at a relatively constant minimal cost. Because that measure has proven so representative of the progress of our technological manufacturing abilities, “Moore’s Law” has become a cornerstone in discussions of pricing, capacity and speed of almost anything in the computer realm. You’ve probably heard the law used generically to refer to the constant improvements in technology: In two years, you can purchase twice as much capacity, speed, bandwidth or any other easily-measureable and relevant technology metric for the price you would pay today and for the current levels of production.

Think back to your first computer. How much storage capacity did it have? You were excited to be counting in bytes and kilobytes … “Look at all this space!” A few years later, you heard about people at NASA using “gigabytes” of space, and you were dumbfounded. Fastforward a few more years, and you wonder how long your 32GB flash drive will last before you need to upgrade the capacity.

As manufacturers have found ways to build bigger and faster drives, users have found ways to fill them up. As a result of this behavior, we generally go from “being able to use” a certain capacity to “needing to use” that capacity. From a hosting provider perspective, we’ve seen the same trend from our customers … We’ll introduce new high-capacity hard drives, and within weeks, we’re getting calls about when we can double it. That’s why we’re always on the lookout for opportunities to incorporate product offerings that meet and (at least temporarily) exceed our customers’ needs.

Today, we announced Quantastor Storage Servers, dedicated mass storage appliances with exceptional cost-effectiveness, control and scalability. Built on SoftLayer Mass Storage dedicated servers with the OS NEXUS QuantaStor Storage Appliance OS, the solution supports up to 48TB of data with the perfect combination of performance economics, scalability and manageability. To give you a frame of reference, this is 48TB worth of hard drives:

If you’ve been looking for a fantastic, high-capacity storage solution, you should give our QuantaStor offering a spin. The SAN (iSCSI) + NAS (NFS) storage system delivers advanced storage features including, thin-provisioning, and remote-replication. These capabilities make it ideally suited for a broad set of applications including VM application deployments, virtual desktops, as well as web and application servers. From what I’ve seen, it’s at the top of the game right now, and it looks like it’s a perfect option for long-term reliability and scalability.

-@nday91

This type of situation happens every day in the IT field. There is some sort of disaster causing a server to crash or simply stop working all together, the drives on the server are completely corrupted and the data is just gone. The question is; when this happens to you, will you be prepared? Thankfully, there are steps each person can take to limit the pain and downtime a situation like this can cause. Like any other disaster recovery plan, the more you are willing to put into it, the more protection you will have when disaster strikes.

This is where SoftLayer comes in. Here at SoftLayer we understand the importants of providing our customers the means to create a good disaster recovery plan that meets their needs. We understand that a detailed disaster recovery plan will include things such as backups and replication. Our services such as NAS and EVault are perfect solutions for performing and managing the backups for you server. When looking into replication, we offer services such as iSCSI replication, Raids, local and global loadbalancing which will provide our customer with the tools to replicate not only their data across multiple locations but their servers as well. Above all, we provide our private network to securely transfer this data to the many locations without impacting the traffic on your public network.

We can only hope that on the day disaster strikes, everyone has some plan in place to deal with it. There is nothing more frustrating in this industry then the loss of crucial data that in many instances cannot be recovered.p

Backups are one of the most commonly forgotten tasks of a system administrator. In some cases, they are never implemented. In other cases, they are implemented but not maintained. In other cases, they are implemented with a great backup and recovery plan – but the system usage or requirements change and the backups are not altered to compensate.

A hard drive really is a fairly reliable piece of IT equipment. The WD 150GB Raptor has a rating of 1.2 Million hours MTBF. With that kind of mean time between failures, you would think that you would never have to worry about a hard drive failing. How willing are you to take that chance? What if you double your odds by setting up two drives in a RAID 1 configuration? Now can you afford to take that chance? How willing are you to gamble with your data?

What if one of your system administrators accidentally deletes the wrong file? Maybe it’s your apache config file. Maybe it’s a piece of code you have been working on all day. Or, maybe your server gets compromised and you now have unknown trojans and back doors on your server. Now what do you do?

Working in a datacenter with thousands of servers, there are thousands and thousands of hard drives. When you see that many hard drives in production, you are naturally going to see some of them fail. I have seen small drives fail, large drives fail, and I have even seen RAID 1 mirrors completely fail beyond recovery. Is it bad hardware? Nope. Is it Murphy’s Law? Nope. It’s the laws of physics. Moving parts create heat and friction. Heat and friction cause failures. No piece of IT equipment is immune to failure.

That 1.2 million hours MTBF looks pretty impressive. For a round number, let’s say there are 15,000 drives in the SL datacenter. 1,200,000 hours / 15,000 drives = 80 hours. That means that every 80 hours, one hard drive in the SL datacenter could potentially fail. Now how impressive is that number?

Ultimately, regardless of the levels of redundancy you implement, there is always a chance of a failure – hardware or human – that results in data loss. The question is – how important is that data to you? In the event of a catastrophic failure, are you willing to just perform an OS reload and start from scratch? Or, if a file is deleted and unrecoverable, are you willing to start over on your project? And lastly, how much downtime can you afford to endure?

Regardless of how much redundancy you can build into your infrastructure with the likes of load balancers, RAID arrays, active/passive servers, hot spares, etc, you should always have a good plan for doing backups as well as checking and maintaining those backups.

Have you checked your backups lately?

-SamF