Thecus Launches First NAS Servers with Support for RAID 50 and 60

[btarunr]

Thecus is pleased to announce the world's first NAS devices with support for RAID 50 and RAID 60. These new NAS devices offer significant advances in performance and fault tolerance for small and medium businesses and enterprise customers. Full RAID 50 support is now available in the following Thecus NAS devices: N6850, N7510, N8850, N8900, N10850, N12000 N12000PRO, N16000, and N16000PRO. In addition, all devices with 8 bays or more, also support RAID 60.

For ultra high speed connectivity, 10GB Ethernet cards are supported. Maximum capacity starts at 24TB in the entry-level N6850, and ranges up to 2.5 petabytes for N12000PRO and N16000PRO systems with additional daisy-chained Thecus D16000 DAS units. For ease-of-use and maximum uptime, standard features in Thecus NAS devices include OLED touch panel display, web and mobile administration, HDMI output, and USB 3.0.



A New Kind of RAID
RAID 50 combines the advantages of RAID 5 and RAID 0, to surpass the performance of both of these lower RAID levels. RAID 50 brings improved read speeds, significantly faster write speeds, greatly improved fault tolerance, reduced access time in random access operations, and greater storage capacity. RAID 60 combines the best of RAID 6 and RAID 0, to improve further on these advances.

Compared to RAID 10, RAID 50 and 60 require much less overhead storage capacity,. Therefore, they cut system costs, power usage, and physical space demands, while still retaining the ability to survive multiple drive failures that would wipe out lesser RAID systems. The greater fault tolerance of RAID 50 and 60 also means little or no loss of performance while a failed drive is swapped out and restored.

"SMB and Enterprise firms have long been looking for a NAS solution that leverages the latest innovations to combine reliability, performance and cost effectiveness in a single device. By being the first to bring RAID 50 and RAID 60 to the NAS device market, we believe we have finally met this growing demand," said Florence Shih, General Manager at Thecus. "We're already seeing great interest from our SMB and Enterprise partners."

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[xvi]

I don't understand the need for RAID 50/60. What benefit does it have over 5/6?

Increased number of drives required, increased storage overhead, decreased performance.. Only thing I can see is that it is tolerant of two drive failures as long as you're lucky enough that it's not from the same RAID 0 side.

  |---RAID 0---|
RAID 5     RAID 5
Stripe     Stripe
Stripe     Stripe
Parity     Parity

One drive failure means you have a 40% chance the next drive failure will wipe all your data. True this is better than RAID 5 with the same number of drives (which would have a 100% chance of failure after the first drive), but only marginally so.

 

[chrisgukde]

I don't understand the need for RAID 50/60. What benefit does it have over 5/6?

Increased number of drives required, increased storage overhead, decreased performance.. Only thing I can see is that it is tolerant of two drive failures as long as you're lucky enough that it's not from the same RAID 0 side.

  |---RAID 0---|
RAID 5     RAID 5
Stripe     Stripe
Stripe     Stripe
Parity     Parity

One drive failure means you have a 40% chance the next drive failure will wipe all your data. True this is better than RAID 5 with the same number of drives (which would have a 100% chance of failure after the first drive), but only marginally so.

I think you need to read the article again. It clearly states what the benefits are. Without seeing the detailed datasheets and benchmarks are guess it would be hard to judge the product at the moment.

 

[xvi]

RAID 50 combines the advantages of RAID 5 and RAID 0, to surpass the performance of both of these lower RAID levels.

What is the definition of performance here?

RAID 50 brings improved read speeds,

Compared to what? Not RAID 0. Not even RAID 1 if your controller is intelligent. Not RAID 5 (certainly not unless it can keep up calculating parity for both RAID 5 arrays). Best case scenario, it'll be about the same.

significantly faster write speeds,

Compared to what? RAID 1, yes. RAID 0, no. RAID 5, no. RAID 6, no. Not with the overhead for parity calculations.

greatly improved fault tolerance,

Compared to what? Again, marginally better than RAID 5 or 6 if you're lucky. Most certainly not better than RAID 1. Obviously better than RAID 0, of course.

reduced access time in random access operations,

Compared to what? Not an intelligent RAID 1. Not any better than RAID 0, 5, or 6.

and greater storage capacity.

Compared to what? RAID 1, yes. RAID 0, no. RAID 5, no. RAID 6, no.

RAID 60 combines the best of RAID 6 and RAID 0, to improve further on these advances.

..by throwing away four drives instead of two to be used as parity. Minimum number of drive failures until data loss stays exactly the same as with RAID 6.

I'm sure the marketing department looked up RAID numbers and said "60! That's bigger than all the other numbers! We want that!" and the engineers just groan and do what they say.

 

[Easy Rhino]

I don't understand the need for RAID 50/60. What benefit does it have over 5/6?

Increased number of drives required, increased storage overhead, decreased performance.. Only thing I can see is that it is tolerant of two drive failures as long as you're lucky enough that it's not from the same RAID 0 side.

  |---RAID 0---|
RAID 5     RAID 5
Stripe     Stripe
Stripe     Stripe
Parity     Parity

One drive failure means you have a 40% chance the next drive failure will wipe all your data. True this is better than RAID 5 with the same number of drives (which would have a 100% chance of failure after the first drive), but only marginally so.

well here yea go

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/th...formance-storage-capacity-and-data-integrity/