There are only two kinds of storage devices - those that have
failed, and those that are about to fail. That's the view most
datacenters have about the traditionally mechanical devices
pejoratively referred to as "spinning rust." All disk drives
fail, cheap drives fail faster.
If the average time to fail is five years, you and your laptop
can make do with the occasional backup. But when an average
enterprise has 100, or 1,000, or increasingly 10,000 or 100,000
individual disk drives, failure is a daily, if not hourly
occurrence. Mechanical devices fail.
And with failure comes the potential for losing data - using
commodity disks to save your boss $500,000 does her no good if
she's fined $50,000,000 for violating data retention regulations.
Stock transactions, medical images or feature length movies -
take your pick, some data has to be perfect. Not a decimal point
or pixel out of place.
That's exactly why, years …
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