RAIN-EC: Permabit's Revolutionary New Data Protection for Grid Archive

Data protection mechanisms for petabyte-scale archives have traditionally been limited to RAID technologies, which perform poorly with modern, high-capacity disks. RAID 6, for example, is advertised as allowing for the simultaneous failure of two disks, but in normal activity serves to recover from uncorrectable read errors during rebuild from a first disk failure; in the event of two disk failures, these errors would likely cause failure of the RAID set. Permabit's RAIN technologies to date have offered a fundamentally different model for data protection than RAID, where unlimited consecutive failures can be automatically handled by the storage system without administrative intervention.