4. Conclusion: Closing Notes

Hopefully this all helps a bit. Even if you didn't know anything about RAID, you should now understand the different types of RAID and be able to make decisions about what you can do with one and in which cases each are useful. This is only the very, very beginning. Now it's time to talk Volume Managers, the mechanism by which all this comes together and works for us. In our next course, we'll learn about the Veritas Volume Manager in particular. Be aware that Veritas isn't the only Volume Manager out there, there is also Sun Solstice DiskSuite, Sun RAID Manager, and others that I don't even know the names of.

This isn't enough information, though. When you choose a volume manager, the documentation will almost always talk about RAID types in detail. This course you've just read is simply a different style of explanation which I've found is better than most others. Here are some links to other places that explain RAID concepts:

• SystemLogic wrote a great tutorial on RAID entitled RAID: An In-Depth Guide To RAID Technology. Find it here: http://www.systemlogic.net/articles/01/1/raid/.

• The RAID Advisory Board (RAB) a good source of information. For all I can tell the organization is dead (their phone number is wrong, they haven't done anything in years) but they still have some good stuff. You can find their page here: http://www.raid-advisory.com/.

  Most notably, they published an excellent book called The RAID Book: A Storage System Technology Handbook which should be on every storage admins shelf. Be aware that the last edition of this book is the 6th Edition, someone published a book and called it the 7th Edition RAID Book, which was not by the RAB. This book is hard to find, but generally Amazon can track down a copy.

• A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) [PDF] by David Patterson, et al. This is THE paper on RAID. The one that started it all. This paper should be read, if for no other reason, as a historical document.