Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | C | Computer Technology Review

What is SCSI-based protection information and why should you care?

Article Excerpt
Data protection has become an increasingly important issue for IT professionals as they juggle the growing demand for highly available, instant access data, with the increasing value of data. The value of this data is based on potential productivity loss, financial loss or even the threat of legal action due to regulatory noncompliance. Many components of a storage system may have data protection designed-in such as Error Correction Code (ECC) memory or Cyclic Redundancy Check (32 bit) (CRC-32) in Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) and fibre channel (FC) Input/output (I/O) interfaces. While storage systems may incorporate some data protection, what is often lacking is the ability to provide end-to-end data protection with an open standard. The solution may lie in the SCSI-based data protection model called "protection information".

Protection information ensures that an I/O transaction has completed without any bad blocks written to disks. Protection information gets applied as the server writes the data to the storage system. During the retrieval of the data, the server checks to make sure that the exact data that was written to the storage system is read back correctly thus providing end-to-end data protection. While the proprietary end-to-end data protection schemes have been around for years, the recent adoption of the...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!