Zoetrope

There's a nice discussion going on about the future for using hardware RAID controllers to build your server infrastructure in the blogosphere.

I'm a bit divided on the issue currently. I'd like to see the whole RAID concept flourish in a software capacity so you don't need to buy and maintain special hardware just to get your data safe when disks fail. I like the idea that in the future the actual hardware doesn't matter. It's certainly looking that way with the uprise of all things virtualized - but even that is currently very SAN/NAS dependent for larger, fully redundant set-ups.

On the other hand I like not having to worry while performing a 30-second disk hot-swap in a time of crisis. I guess the hot-swap issue will continue to be an issue even if hardware RAID *is* dying.

To be continued?