can someone tell me what is raid, servers. network servers etc.

i'm trying to learn about business related IT(ie anything that a typical business will use at their work place)

 

Have you tried Wikipedia?

 

Or Google?

You could spend days reading up on RAID alone.

There's a vast amount of products a business might use. If you want one popular product, have a look at Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS)

 

BTW Popular doesnt mean good

 

i looked up on raid ages ago, but it kinda lost me

is that when 1 computer have more than 1 hdd,
i have 1 master sata HDD, and 2 slaves IDE, does that mean i have a raid?

 

is a server. the main computer with the main programs of a network?


what is a network server?

 

In simple terms you have 2 identical drives in your pc, basically the data on one is replicated immediately on the other so in theory if one hard drive fails the other kicks in and you carry on working without losing any data.

No, You have to setup the raid drives yourself, simply having multiple hdds in your pc doesn't mean you have raid.

 

so its like having 2 identical drives in one computer (2nd one copies what ever you add or take off on the first one automatically?) the 2nd one only becomes active IF the first one dies?

kinda strange. but that deffo. sounds like major businesses uses them

 

Guys

RAID used to mean "redundant array of inexpensive disks" now because the cost of disks has increased especially for serial ata implementations and even before them with paralell scsi disk they changed the name to "redundant array of independant disks" dont quote..

In a nutshell in high risk environments or maybe even in environments where data is deemed or high importance using uptime as the scale, RAID plays its part in fault tollerance for disk based data and ranges anywhere from
0,1,1+0,4,5,6,10,50 arrays all combining different types of tollerance for fault and performance throughput. RAID is very much a hardware based technology but windows can perform software based emulation.

Build your RAID based on application requirements primarily.

 

RAID 4 & 6? - Not heard of them.

I bet a RAID 5+0 is fun to set up

 

It's pretty much overkill for home use but for business use is critical, if a hdd fails in a file server serving 50 users they'd be pretty pissed about not having access to their data (well, the bosses would as it's costing them a lot of money in downtime) while a new drive is fitted, formatted, backup data restored etc

 

Hey Bob

i think RAID 4 was hamming code, expensive but fast (its old tech now)

RAID 6 is similar to RAID 5 although it has two parity drives so in affect you can lose 2 disks before you lose your data. Its effectiveness is seen above 5-6 disks i think but again should be designed for the app. SQL for example is a nono on both 5 and 6 1+0 or 50 all the way.

-A

 

so its a 2nd hdd that does automatically "backup/duplicate" 1st hdd (more or less)

but what does all the numbers that everyone mentioned means?

 

Raid can be a tricky thing to get a grasp of beyond the basics so get those first.

If you are serious about getting to grips with technology and terms, have a read of all of these and see if anything is clearer and then come back with questions, there are loads on here dealing with this stuff daily who I'm sure will be happy to help.

Easy Guide to Networking

 

Suggest you also have a read of this: Service-oriented architecture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Dont get bogged down in Raid levels, just be aware its to make storage more resilient and/or faster (depending on the level)

Read also on,

NAS/SAN and general storage tech
Databases - Oracle SQL Server
Operating systems, Linux, Unix and Windows - many versions of each.
Programming languages .Net, Java are the current main ones
Web Servers, Apache etc
XML
Application vendors, SAP, Oracle etc
Clustering
Failover/Disaster Recovery Concepts


As has been said, Wikipedia is brilliant, its still complex but its never been so accesible, time spent persusing it will make you learn a lot, its generally the best explanation you will get, very good for anything that isnt emotive or open to interpretation, IT is very literal.

 

I thought raid 6 was now the ratified std for Raid 4 DP? (netapp)

 

A hybrid of yes

RAID 4 does in fact use a version of parity but the parity disk is independant to the rest of the array. In essence all parity information to rebuild a failed disk is stored on one dedicated disk and not spread out amongst the other drives. RAID 5 and 6 use the disks within the array to spread the parity information and 6 uses a double parity scheme which requires extra space but allows for more disks to fail before complete data loss. Performance penalties ahoy!

NETApp system are great we used them for the backend of a VBak system with online data backups, they in fact have a system called RAID-DP which is basically a hybrid RAID 6 double parity array and is similar to the older RAID 4 but provides more than a single disk failure. I think this is a standard they have very much pioneered as your standard SME vendors wouldn't cater for such technology, just standard RAID levels.

RAID 2 was hamming code doh ...