RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the data that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info that you upload to your cloud web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a faulty disk is replaced, the data which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we make VPS server use quick NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your sites noticeably. The hard drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the content without loss if a main drive breaks down. If you pick our backup service, the data will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your website content all the time. With this particular setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on multiple drives.