Tutorial IV - Increasing business productivity and reliability through RAID

Candler

So you’re a new business owner and you’re looking to expand out of your personal home office PC into a larger network system.   You will be dealing with a fast-paced, high demanding customer, but at the same time, you want to guarantee that information that you store will be protected.  You will need to look at a RAID system, to help provide your fledgling business with this capability.

RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks will give you a variety of option to improved performance while allowing for redundancy.  The size of your new business may dictate the type of RAID system that you want to go with, but we’ll cover RAID 0, 1, and 5 to give a few examples.

Candler

RAID 0 is one of the easiest and least expensive RAID systems to work with.  To basically break it down, imagine two hard drives side by side, but treated as one.  Half of the data would be written to the first drive and the second half to the other drive.  This would dramatically improve the read / write performance of your storage system, but RAID 0 offers no redundancy at all.  If one of the hard drives fail, then that data would be permanently lost.

RAID 1 on the other hand would be set up exactly the same way as RAID 0, except for one fact.  Instead of dividing the information to be written to the drives, it would actually duplicate all of the information on drive 1 to drive 2.  The read / write process would not be improved at all, but you would now have 100% redundancy in case one of the drives did fail.

Candler

RAID 5 would be a superior option providing numerous improvements over both the 0, and 1 system.  Raid 5 would provide multiple disks to divide the information that is read / written over, but at the same time would allow for redundancy.  A complete drive could fail, but data integrity would still be in place.  If a drive did fail, performance would be degraded, but the process would be seamless, until the broken drive could be replaced.

In all, if your business is growing, then looking at various RAID schemes to increase the performance of your system, as well as redundancy would be the way to go.  This would provide for faster support, along with a level of data security that cannot be offered on a single hard drive.

Secure Email Project

Secure Email is an area of computing that I was not very familiar with.  I had heard the terms used before, but was not used to hearing about encryption, keys, etc.  I found an article from 2001, regarding using secure emails, and I reviewed it just to decipher where secure email originally developed from.

Going through this original article on CNET news from May 30th, 2001, it seemed that at the time, there were a variety of loose secure email methods floating around. A standard had not been set yet. The article covers that only a few companies at the time were using any kind of secure email and that the Open PGP Alliance was becoming the Internet standard for encryption.  It used publc key specific to recipients.  This was just covered this past week in class, and I find it interesting that less than ten years ago, a standard had not been set. 

The article goes on to talk about how the key players that worked with the various encryption techniques were not all on board, but realized that a universal option needed to be devised.   It states that by joining forces it would enable the various companies to communicate better, faster, and more efficiently, without having to determine which format to use.

In all, I think that for companies with sensitive information, email security would be vital.  With companies developing new products and services, the last thing they would want is for a competitor to discover the new trade secret that might change the marketplace.

Article Link

http://news.cnet.com/Companies-ally-for-secure-e-mail/2100-1001_3-265402.html