Running a company heavily reliant on IT services and wondering how to improve business continuity? Our new article explains the key differences between High Availability (HA) and Fault Tolerance (FT) and will help you choose the right IT resilience strategy.

If you ever worked in IT, you have heard the acronym RAID.  RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (some call it Inexpensive) Disks. So, it basically refers to a group of disk logically presented as one or more volumes to the external system – a server, for instance. The main two reasons to have RAID are Performance and Redundancy.  With RAID, you can minimize the access time and increase the throughput of data. RAID also allows one or more disks in the array to fail without losing any data.

This is a research dedicated to practical implementation of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. It is a part of a series of posts about S2D and features a detailed comprehensive instruction on building a fault-tolerant 4-node setup. Storage Spaces Direct is the next step of Storage Spaces, meaning it is an extension of the current SDS for Windows Server. Storage Spaces Direct utilizes SMB3 for all intra-node interaction, including the latest SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel. The testing of S2D is hot right now, so StarWind is doing its part as well. This setup is meant to withstand node failures and the post reveals how exactly it performs in this respect.

Here is a comparison of two technologies with similar task but different methods of accomplishing it – Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) and Multipath I/O (MPIO). Both are aimed at providing higher throughput when one connection can’t handle the task. To achieve that, LACP bundles several physical ports into a single logical channel. MPIO, on the other hand, utilizes more than one physical path, even if the working application does not support more than one connection. Both technologies seem to be equally effective at first glance, but further study confirms that one of them is better at achieving its goal. The post is practical, so expect detailed research with screenshots and complete analysis of the technologies in a test case.