Slides: Here

Note the venue - we are in our new location!

Summary For those of us still configuring physical servers and storage, using RAID to ensure the availability of storage is part of our everyday jobs. But things are changing rapidly in the types of storage devices being used, as well as their characteristics. Standard RAID techniques may carry consequences that solution architects may not realize are present.

This talk will examine the beginnings of RAID, how we got to where we are at now, and some of the issues that currently exist with RAID. Alternate techniques (including open source solutions) can provide more resiliency with fewer gotchas. There will also be a quick tutorial on "fio", the flexible I/O tester.

Bio Dwain Sims has been working in the UNIX/Linux world for the last 30 years. He started out using BSD UNIX on a PDP-11 while in Graduate School (West Virginia University), and he has been hooked ever since.

Dwain has worked as a system admin and data center architect, product manager, trainer, and as a Systems Engineer for various companies (including Sun Microsystems and Fusion-io). He currently works for Western Digital / SanDisk / HGST. (yes, he is confused at times!)

He has been working in the storage (mainly Flash) world for the last 5 years, helping bring the storage revolution to the masses. He lives in North Raleigh with his wife Cleo (of 28 years), 4 children (1 married and living in Charlotte - a Nurse Practitioner, 2 at NC State, and one still living at home), and 5 hens.

September 14 - Meeting Announcements