RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the info that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file properly and to verify the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info you upload to your cloud hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The NVMe drives which are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what info will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive shall be correct. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the problematic drive will not impact the normal operation of your sites in any respect. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses special digital identifiers referred to as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that we provide are made on physical servers that use NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the data cloned on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the correct information is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will stay online because all the info will still load from at least 1 other hard drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the data will be saved on standard hard drives which also function in RAID because we would like to make certain that any kind of content you add will be risk-free all of the time. Working with multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.