Saturday, February 12, 2011

An Introduction to JBOD

By Marleen Daniels


One doesn't need a degree in Computer Engineering to be able to grasp the intricacies of JBOD and data storage. The acronym means "Just a Bunch of Disks." You might have many old disks that you don't need anymore and rather than disposing them or selling them on eBay or some other second hand stuff for sale website, you could save time, money and effort by putting using them in a data storage disc system. It is a cost effective way of aggregating viable storage space into a cohesive whole. It has many applications that could save your enterprise on storage costs and efficiency.

You shouldn't be afraid of words like NAS Storage, JBOD, Desktop RAID and their ilk. All of them are merely acronyms that pertain to a system of putting a bunch of disks together albeit in different configurations and purposes. For one, Network Access Storage is the distant cousin of the file server. JBOD's Just a Bunch of Disks. RAID is just a Redundant Array of Independent or Inexpensive Disks. See? That didn't hurt. All in all these are ways for your company save on costs by putting your hard disks to their optimal usages. Each system has its own distinct advantages and disadvantages.

That's the beauty of these different storage systems, you get to pick one for a particular purpose that your organization or company needs. For instance, these devices or systems are good for archiving. RAID is good for close to paranoid backup systems because they provide multiple redundancies and NAS is good for networked backups.

You may say that this is the exact inverse of partitioning. Remember that in partitioning drives, you basically have a single drive which you slice up in many partitions. This is advantageous specially if you are thinking of having multiple operating systems at your disposal. Partitioning is useful and "spanning" is useful too. They have their own uses.

As mentioned before, each storage system has its own unique advantages. These configurations are good for archiving. Whereas RAID systems are a versatile and efficient way to ensure that you don't lose data because of the multiple redundancies. NAS on the other hand, provides for an easy way to store and access information. All of these systems provide for the use of multiple disks in a variety of way to ensure optimal usage that adapts to your needs.

For one, JBOD systems use "spanning" and "concatenation", which are merely the words used to inform you of how your disks combined to form just one disk. RAID systems form an array or a collection that ensures that there will always be multiple copies of the same file.

For every positive there is a negative. No one storage system is perfect and well suited for all purposes. One may glean some insight from their respective acronyms. RAID provides you with the reassurance of redundancy although different configurations may cause different issues pertaining to performance and compatibility. NAS gives you the ease and capability to let users access over the network however, these also tend to clog network connections. These devices are ideal for unifying multiple disks into a singular virtual drive, but falls short when one of these drives fail.

In a nutshell those are the advantages and disadvantages of these systems. Perhaps another aspect of these disc setups is that it is very cheap to implement and maintain. Most enterprises use them as an archival system meant to keep backups of files that are not always used in the same level as active files. By using old and spanned disks, these files can be stored in an easy to access fashion that does not require extensive capital outlay.




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