WDTalk

RAID is NOT a back up solution!!

RAID is a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, designed by combining multiple disk drives into an array of disks. Why? To yield performance? Yes. To act as backup? No. Yet, many resellers still mistakenly believe a RAID solution sufficiently protects their data, and neglect to backup their mission critical data remotely or to tape. The Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of a RAID solution is the MTBF of an individual drive, divided by the number of drives in the array. You’re thinking, “Well, wait a second. This means that the MTBF becomes lower, not higher. How does that help?” Keep reading.

Disk arrays are designed to provide fault tolerance by redundantly storing information in a variety of methods.

RAID-0

RAID-0 is a striping solution. In level 0, data is split across the drives, resulting in higher data throughput.  Performance is enhanced, but the failure of any disk in the array results in data loss.  For improved performance in RAID0 solutions, synchronized spindles are recommended, especially when allocating small stripes. RAID0 solutions provide NO redundancy.

I would only recommend using RAID-O only if the data there is transient, as it WILL be eventually lost. Here especially, maintain remote offsite backups because of the increased risk.

RAID-1

RAID Level 1, on the other hand, does provide redundancy by writing data to two or more drives.  Reads tend to be faster, but writes slower as compared to a single drive, however if either drive fails, no data is lost. This is commonly called mirroring and only requires two drives.

If you have a failure of a single drive in a RAID1 array (either software or hardware) all you would have to is put a new drive in and tell the controller (or the software drivers) to rebuild the array. This is considered replacing a failed drive of an existing RAID array.

RAID1 is not economical past four hard drives. RAID1 OS disks are well worth their expense.

RAID-2

RAID Level 2 is intended for use with drives that don’t have built-in error detection. Unfortunately SCSI drives do support built-in error detection – not a good mix.

RAID-3

RAID Level 3 stripes data at a byte level across several drives, with parity stored on one of the drives.

RAID-4

RAID Level 4 stripes data (at a block level) across several drives, with parity stored on one drive. Parity facilitates recovery from any failed drive. Read times are the same as RAID0 and writes (even though relatively fast), require parity data to be updated each time.

RAID-5

The difference between 4 and 5 is that parity is spread across all drives in the array. Parity is no longer a bottleneck, but reads are slower than RAID-4.  You win some – you lose some.

As the disk count increases in a RAID-5 array, so does the storage efficiency. This is because there is one disk’s worth of redundancy (parity) per array. For example a 3-disk RAID-5 has one disk’s worth of parity and two disk’s worth of usable space, therefore the efficiency is 67%, i.e., 67% of the total disk space is available for user data.

Efficiency = (DiskCount-1) / DiskCount

A degraded RAID-5 is an array with a failed disk. If the user tries to read a block on the failed disk the RAID software will have to access all the other disks in the array to reconstruct that missing data. However if the user tries to read a block on one of the remaining good disks then nothing special happens. The data is simply read from the disk.

RAID -10

RAID10 is a combination of mirroring and striping. Each disk block is completely duplicated on its drives mirror.  If a drive in the RAID10 array dies, data is returned from its mirror drive in a single read with only minor performance reduction. What happens though when you lose the mirror drive during recovery? Ouch!

Still most hard drives failures are related to manufacturing defects, so one pro-active approach is to mirror each drive with one from a different manufacturer’s lot number.  I’m still reading a thread in one forum about massive simultaneous Seagate 1.5TB drive failures. Multiple simultaneous drive failures in any RAID array is not as uncommon as you may think. Think about this. Most companies buy the hard drives they install in servers from preferred vendors, and buy in volume to get discount pricing. If there’s a manufacturing defect in that lot of hard drives, the MTBF of each of those drives is very similar. When one drive fails, does it put a heavier load on the remaining drives in the array? Hard drives have moving parts, thus will eventually wear out. RAID cards do fail as well, but that’s very rare.

RAID arrays provide a buffer to swap drives without powering down, but it’s still very necessary to maintain offsite remote backup in case your server completely crashes. Years ago, I had a client bring in a server that had lightning damage – charred black components – DOA.  Minus a RAID array (in this case, the server was fried – LOL), you can still recover from backups. Downtime is the persuasive consideration, as your customers will notice, thus increasing the likelihood of churn. If your site gets hacked or you accidentally delete half your root partition, RAID will provide no protection.

The common (minimum) configurations are 2 drives in RAID-1 and 4 drives in RAID-10 as that is the most economical setup to get an array benefit. RAID-5 can be provisioned with 3 drives to give you a stripe and a parity drive.

Hardware versus Software RAID Solutions

Software RAID solutions occupy their hosts system memory and CPU resources (system dependent) – degrading overall server performance. Hardware RAID solutions allow the host server to execute user applications while the array adapter’s processor simultaneously executes the array functions.

What about fault tolerance?

Software based solutions generally require a separate boot drive, which is NOT included in the array. If the boot drive is in the array and it fails, the software array will not boot, as it must be read from the disk and executed from resident memory.

Hardware arrays are highly fault tolerant since its array logic is based in hardware, eliminating the need to boot from software.

Horror stories of multiple simultaneous drive failures in RAID arrays

I’ve seen threads pop up in forums, a little more frequently, about multiple simultaneous drive failures in RAID arrays. I recall an episode related to Seagate hard drives. Seagate’s SD1A firmware update, meant to fix problems with its Barracuda 7200.11 models, only managed to make things worse-bricking the drives of those who bothered to install it. They pulled their update pending validation. Barracuda owners who flashed their disks with the firmware found that after they rebooted, they’d receive a system disk failure error message. Backups, if they were stored on the same drive that was flashed, also became unavailable. Wait a moment! Who does backups on the same drive? I saw one analogy that went like this. It’s like installing seat belts in a car, but not allowing you to buckle them until you’ve been thrown through the windshield.

I’ve seen threads from quite a few furious OPs in various forums flaming their hosts because their mission critical data was lost forever because of multiple simultaneous drive failures in a RAID array on their server. When they picked their host, they were on the same forums asking for FREE this and FREE that – lowest cost – yet the data they intended to entrust to that host was mission critical to their business. This whole concept slays me. Your data is your business.

My recommendation

My preference is hot swappable hard drives – always have a hot spare, and if possible a second hot spare. Be sure to back up your data remotely and on tape. One hardcore statistic is that over 80% of companies that have lost their data go out of business within one year. Don’t allow yourself to be part of that statistic. Don’t rely solely on RAID array solutions to protect your data. Make them one part of a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Redundant solutions (remote and tape back ups) should be a vital component of that plan.

What are Raving Fans? According to Ken Blanchard, “Having raving fans means that you have achieved the kind of service excellence that turns a customer into a lifetime customer. A raving fan is an advocate of your products or services in the marketplace.” Ken and Sheldon Bowles co-authored “Raving Fans,” A Revoluntionary Approach to Customer Service. This book is so revoluntionary that one local business in Saint Louis required all of its employees, from sales to warehouse delivery, to read and pass a test about its content.

The core focus of their book is going that extra 1% in everything you do, to ensure each contact with every client is memorable.

If You Don’t Take Care of Your Customers, Someone Else Will
We’ve all heard this phrase before, because it’s so true. In contrast, according to Bain & Company, companies can boost profits as much as 255% by retaining merely 5% more of their existing customers.

In business, we’re all looking for that strategic advantage
Prospects and clients are demanding more than ever, expecting to get what they want, when they want it, and customized to their requirements – at the least expense possible. In the web hosting industry, many providers have resorted to offers of unlimited space and bandwidth at ridiculously low prices (an overselling marketing strategy) to give them a strategic advantage of perception. In the industry, we all realize that “unlimited” is not possible for space and bandwidth, but the perception to the general public is quite different. At odds to these offers are clauses in their respective Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policies that, in fact, prohibit certain types of services, or place ‘real” limits on their offers – but who reads TOS and AUP statements? At odds with the Raving Fans theory, their strategy is to get the prospect in the door, sell them, then deal with overages in space and bandwidth on the backside. It’s no wonder I see so many complaints in forums on the Internet from users who thought they were buying into a fabulous deal, only to have their ‘budget’ host terminate their services.

What is the better strategy?
Is it better to employ strategies to convert prospects at the cost of higher churn, or is it better to manage your prospects expectations, in a manner that makes sense to both their business and yours – that provides a solution to their needs?

Are cold leads or warm leads more profitable?
That’s an easy question to answer. I’m not aware of any sales rep who doesn’t prefer warm leads. Clients who have already bought into your services and products need to be your Raving Fans. They need to be your advocate in the industry. When you improve your client’s satisfaction, you drive repeat business.

Customer Support
Its simply not enough to receive a support ticket, fix the issue on your side, then close the ticket. Why? Support tickets are created by clients who have some issue with your product or service. That specific issue may be very minor or could be critical to their operation. When you’re working on a support ticket, do you make an assumption of revelance, or do you communicate with your client to gain a comprehensive understanding of the issue, from their point of view. Are you professional in those communications? Do you accept responsibility if the problem is on your end? Do you go that extra 1% to assure them that their business is important to you?

Do you want to boost your profit by retaining a larger percentage of your existing clients?
Yes?! It starts by creating a culture of ‘I Care.” I strongly recommend reading “Raving Fans.” Its a little quirky, but very insightful. What do you have to lose – except a few clients? We all want our businesses to boom, in spite of our current state of the nation. Align your business to ensure seamless customer service is delivered consistently. Manage your prospects expectations – don’t promise the world, then pull the rug from beneath their feet.  And empower your employees to know when and where they can make a difference.

Of course you don’t know what you don’t know, but how important is it to know what you don’t know? Personally, I don’t know a lot about astrophysics, but that’s not really important to me. LOL. My wife and I own a hair salon, so understanding beauty products is essential. Knowing the difference between hi-lites and lo-lites, or how to apply color is a must.

Making assumptions
In most industries, vendors take knowledge for granted – and by that I mean they assume most clients know more than they really do. Here’s an example. Most of us have dealt with printers, specifically replacing toner cartridges, but how many of us understand toner yields – how many pages you can reasonably expect to print from that new cartridge. Vendors use terms like yields 250 pages at 6% coverage. They don’t tell you that if you use any shading whatsoever on your prints, coverage jumps over 12%, cutting the yield of that cartridge in half – to just 125 pages!

Not knowing what you don’t know could put your online business at risk
In web hosting, an awful lot of prospects buy on price. Hey, the economy is tough – we’re all trying to stretch our dollars. When a few of the larger providers started offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth on their shared webhosting plans, it raised some eyebrows because everyone in the industry knew unlimited was unrealistic. Of course, there were limitations on their unlimited plans, buried in their Terms and Conditions, but how many of us really read Terms and Conditions? In this instance, not knowing what you don’t know could put your online business at risk. 

Don’t have a clue?
In the web hosting industry, there are shared hosting plans, virtual plans, semi-dedicated, reseller plans, VPS, clouds, dedicated servers and colocation. If I asked my wife to tell me the difference between them, she’d be like, “What?” Most small business owners realize on some level that they need a website, but probably more than a few are just like my wife. They know they need an online presence, would love to sell their product or service online, but have no idea how to go about doing that – so they do what most of us do now. We search the Internet for info, and try to decipher what makes one provider, developer or vendor more appealing than the next.

Would not knowing what you don’t know hinder your ability to select a new vendor?
A common theme I hear from business owners is, “I have a website, and I need or want to make some changes, but the firm or person who designed my site went out of business and now I’m stuck and need help.” Would not knowing what you don’t know hinder your ability to select a new vendor? How would you know what questions to ask? If I were to tell you that your landing page size was 1.03 megabytes, could you relate that to return traffic or conversion ratios? If you reduced that page size to under 60 kilobytes, would that increase your sales?

We can’t be expected to know everything
Of course none of us can be expected to know everything. That’s why we leave certain things to the experts, like brain surgery. In web hosting, stuff like bandwidth and disk space are important, but so is the stability and expertise of the provider you host with. I’ve always heard that the measure of a great company is not so much what they offer, but how they respond under pressure or stress. How do they treat their customers? Companies that survive the test of time are those that understand the lifetime value of their clients.

What separates web hosting providers?
Aside from the obvious like plans and pricing, why would you select one web hosting provider over another? If I’m a growing mom and pop shop or even a small business with thousands of dollars tied into IT infrastructure and online marketing strategies, there is a common thread – the need to know what you don’t know.  I always recommend asking lots of questions in your search, but equally important are the questions your prospective provider asks you. Do they genuinely show an interest in your business, and offer solutions based on your specific requirements and growth projections, or do they simply offer packages. As you grow, can you upgrade your plan – for example from shared to dedicated? And is knowing that important? It’s important for your provider to know what you don’t know, and that they help by partnering to grow your business and theirs.

I recently attended a local Chamber of Commerce afterhours party where - one of the discussions turned to Social Media Marketing as a business tool. An interesting point was made that prospects, cross-industry, aren’t as open to direct sales calls, but would rather search the Internet for information related to potential purchases for everything from shoes, cars, homes and restaurants - to web hosting.

Do you write content for your website or blog? It only follows that if prospects (for your products or services) are keying in search queries to find relevant  information on the Internet, that you should be there. I guarantee this – your competition WILL be there.

Writer’s Block - Don’t know what to write about? Select anything you’re passionate about. What do you know about your product or service that could be beneficial to the reader? Very often, if you just start jotting down notes throughout the day, some topic will jump off the paper and hit you square in the middle of your forehead.  The real key here to just do it. There are NO excuses for NOT writing. All of us lead very busy lives, bombarded with demands on our time and energy.

Providing information relevant to the search query is paramount - First, pick a topic geared to providing information, either how-to or solutions based – the goal being to help / provide insight. Start with a topic in your specific niche, like “Website Design” or “Automotive Repair,” then create a title based on emotion, or anything that you think would draw a click through. Some examples would be, “Unlimited space and bandwidth = unlimited risks” or “Increasing the quality of  marketing campaigns.”

Keep your paragraphs short - I realize you’re excited about your stuff, but loooooooooooong paragraphs turn OFF most surfers. Break your content down into specific thoughts or steps, with one paragraph leading or flowing to the next. Try to compile some fashion of chronological order. Hopping around will only confuse the reader and cause them to lose focus.

Touch as many of the five senses as possible - Of the five senses, I mean sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing.  Obliviously, these won’t all apply to each article, but through a combination of graphics, and painting pictures with words, you’ll create mental images that will reinforce your call-to-action.

End with a recommendation -  Recommendations can be tips, cautions or proposed solutions. Prospects are searching the Web to alleviate some pain or issue, grow their company or enhance their lives. Try to stay positive.

I am a HUGE fan of cutting edge technology, so when I stumbled across this video http://www.wimp.com/sixthtechnology posted on a web hosting forum, I had to watch it – from start to finish (approximately 15 minutes).

Why?
Time after time, my jaw dropped as new innovations were presented, linking objects in the physical world to the digital world. The video started with a simple upgrade to a two roller mouse, enabling the user to mimic finger movements on his monitor. And it kept getting better – taking pictures by framing objects with his hands, making outbound calls via a projected keypad on his palm, projecting live weather information onto his newspaper map, and on and on.

I’m Excited
The future is here today, and I’m proud to share its contribution to innovative technology with articles that compliment the delivery of new ideas and broad vision.

From WordPress

“WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.”

“WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.).”

“WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product.”

Key Features

• Full standards compliance- We have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today’s browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less.
• No rebuilding – Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.
• WordPress Pages- Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static “About” page that you manage through WordPress. For an idea of how powerful this is, the entire WordPress.org site could be run off WordPress alone. (We don’t for technical mirroring reasons.)
• WordPress Links– Links allows you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. This is much faster than calling an external blogroll manager.
• WordPress Themes- WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click. Have a new design every day.
• Cross-blog communication tools- WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards, and we are committed to supporting future standards as they develop.
• Comments- Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.
• Spam protection- Out of the box WordPress comes with very robust tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog, and there is also a rich array of plugins that can take this functionality a step further.
• Full user registration- WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users.
• Password Protected Posts — You can give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public. You can also have private posts which are viewable only by their author.
• Easy installation and upgrades— Installing WordPress and upgrading from previous versions and other software is a piece of cake. Try it and you’ll wonder why all web software isn’t this easy.
• Easy Importing— We currently have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine are under way.
• XML-RPC interface— WordPress currently supports an extended version of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. You can even use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.
• Workflow — You can have types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page.
• Typographical niceties —WordPress uses the Texturize engine to intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities. This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands.
• Intelligent text formatting — If you’ve dealt with systems that convert new lines to line breaks before you know why they have a bad name: if you have any sort of HTML they butcher it by putting tags after every new line indiscriminately, breaking your formatting and validation. Our function for this intelligently avoids places where you already have breaks and block-level HTML tags, so you can leave it on without worrying about it breaking your code.
• Multiple authors — WordPress’ highly advanced user system allows up to 10 levels of users, with different levels having different (and configurable) privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users.
• Bookmarklets— Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort.
• Ping away— WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines. “

Promoting your business – some thought provoking questions

I just subscribed – to “Hello. My name is Scott.” He’s the guy with the nametag (never takes it off).  Scott Ginsberg is an internationally recognized expert on nametags and the authority on approachability. I was recently scanning through his library and came across a few thought provoking statements, which in turn raised some thought provoking questions. LOL

Scott contends that - it’s better to be heard about rather than be heard from, which makes sense, but it raises the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg? Advertising is played down as that focuses on ‘hearing from,’ but how do prospects hear about you without some facet of marketing, whether that consists of email broadcasting, direct mail, Internet forums, social networking, telemarketing or direct sales canvassing. We don’t all have walk-in businesses, and most small businesses start with zero customers, so word of mouth is a limited resource.

Earning ‘heard about’ status takes – time to gel. Great customer service certainly speeds the process. Empowering your employees to go that extra one percent in every contact or dealing they encounter with your prospects or clients encourages Raving Fans – those who will advocate your products and services for you (within their sphere of influence). Raving Fans turn the tide from “Heard From” to “Heard About.”