Here Comes RAID 6 for Widespread Enterprise Storage

Many enterprises have begun replacing RAID 5 with the relatively new RAID 6, which can handle multiple disk failures and thereby provide greater protection against data loss.

Enabling data-in-place migration between diverse RAID solutions is perhaps the most significant advantage of the DDF specification. Data-in-place migration is increasingly preferred in large enterprises because it is faster and easier than the traditional practice of backup, reconfiguration, and restore. However, with the rapid growth in data volume and associated disk capacity and the sum total capacity of RAID arrays, IT departments are faced with another serious risk of data loss through latent failures, also known as unrecoverable read errors.

To address this trend, the current draft of the SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) workgroup called the Common RAID Disk Data Format Technical Working Group (DDF TWG)specification that supports RAID 6. This means that RAID solutions supporting the DDF specification can also support RAID 6, thereby dramatically reducing the risk of catastrophic data loss during RAID rebuilds.

It's conceivable, a decade down the road, that the 40%-plus rate of storage growth curve will flatten as migration in place reduces the need for multiple, redundant data copies.