RAIDn technology

RAIDn technology

[Oliver Tennert]

Hello,

has anybody ever heard of RAID^n technology, developed and patented by a
company called Inostor (http://www.inostor.com)?

It is designed to offer protection against the simultaneous failure of an
arbitrary number of arbitrary disks.

The pdf files publicly available on their homepage states that the
algorithms used by them to implement an m+n RAID system (m data disks, n
redundancy disks) are NOT the well-known Reed-Solomon codes as e.g.
described in a well-known paper by J. Plank.

Does anybody have a notion how RAID^n works? Their algorithms used seem to
hold a regular US patent.

Many thanks and best regards

Oliver Tennert


__
________________________________________creating IT solutions

Dr. Oliver Tennert			science + computing ag
phone   +49(0)7071 9457-598		Hagellocher Weg 71-75
fax     +49(0)7071 9457-411		D-72070 Tuebingen, Germany
O.Tennert@science-computing.de		www.science-computing.de

Re: RAIDn technology

[Dominik Kubla]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 03:20:05PM +0100, Oliver Tennert wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> has anybody ever heard of RAID^n technology, developed and patented by a
> company called Inostor (http://www.inostor.com)?

Yes. Similiar to the RAID6 apporach of the md device. Tandberg Data. seems to
be using it.  There is a (german language article) by somebody from Tandberg
at:
http://www.speicherguide.de/magazin/background.asp?theID=112

Just asking google for "RAIDn" will give you a bunch of references...

Regards,
  Dominik Kubla
-- 
When God created two sexes, he may have been overdoing it.
		-- Charles Merrill Smith

Re: RAIDn technology

[Oliver Tennert]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Dominik Kubla wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 03:20:05PM +0100, Oliver Tennert wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > has anybody ever heard of RAID^n technology, developed and patented by a
> > company called Inostor (http://www.inostor.com)?
>
> Yes. Similiar to the RAID6 apporach of the md device. Tandberg Data. seems to
> be using it.  There is a (german language article) by somebody from Tandberg
> at:
> http://www.speicherguide.de/magazin/background.asp?theID=112
>
> Just asking google for "RAIDn" will give you a bunch of references...


True, it points a bunch of marketing papers, but none of any value. What
I am interested in is the actual algorithms used because they state that
they DO NOT use any kind of RS code... strange...

Best regards

Oliver Tennert









>
> Regards,
>   Dominik Kubla
> --
> When God created two sexes, he may have been overdoing it.
> 		-- Charles Merrill Smith
>

__
________________________________________creating IT solutions

Dr. Oliver Tennert			science + computing ag
phone   +49(0)7071 9457-598		Hagellocher Weg 71-75
fax     +49(0)7071 9457-411		D-72070 Tuebingen, Germany
O.Tennert@science-computing.de		www.science-computing.de

Re: RAIDn technology

[Marc Bevand]

Oliver Tennert wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> has anybody ever heard of RAID^n technology, developed and patented by a
> company called Inostor (http://www.inostor.com)?
> 
> It is designed to offer protection against the simultaneous failure of an
> arbitrary number of arbitrary disks.
> 
> The pdf files publicly available on their homepage states that the
> algorithms used by them to implement an m+n RAID system (m data disks, n
> redundancy disks) are NOT the well-known Reed-Solomon codes as e.g.
> described in a well-known paper by J. Plank.

This paper is [1]. But AFAIK it describes only Vandermonde-based
Reed-Solomon codes, not Cauchy-based ones.

> Does anybody have a notion how RAID^n works? Their algorithms used seem to
> hold a regular US patent.

RAID^n is nothing more than FEC (Forward Error Correction). Any erasure
code can be used to implement FEC:

 - Cauchy-based Reed-Solomon codes
 - Vandermonde-based Reed-Solomon codes
 - Low-Density Parity-Check codes [2] (eg: Tornado Codes...)

Tornado codes are patented by Digital Fountain [3] (RFC 3453 contains a
list of the patents). Maybe Inostor uses them ?

[1] http://www.cs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/papers/CS-96-332.html
[2] http://www.cs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/papers/CS-03-510.html
[3] http://www.digitalfountain.com

-- 
Marc Bevand