Thanks for the tip about the new Yard Houses in Phoenix. A man can get mighty parched out here in the techno-blog desert. Yet if memory serves, the Long Beach Yard House claims some 250 taps, while their other stores are about 150. It will be interesting to see where the Phoenix stores come in.

I’ve drunk lots of Boddingtons and Newcastle Brown Ale and enjoy them very much. I’ve also spent many an enjoyable hour in Munich’s beer gardens sampling Bavaria’s finest. Yet to me the Belgium has the richest beer-making tradition in the world and the products to back it up.

Anyway back to RAID and ZFS and future GFS, from business point of view, why are RAID type systems needed? For availability mainly, I guess. But then why till now only RAID-5 is almost the one in use? I know there are couple of RAID-6 vendors, but not many are buying RAID-6. What is the reason? Is it because RAID-5 already provides enough availability so there is not much need for RAID-6 (or n>6) or other reasons? Or because of performance issues? Or return on investment? I know quite a lot about RAID technology, but just don’t know if there is (will be) big market for RAID-n(>5). ZFS/GFS type of things are going beyond RAID-5 mostly by mirroring. So there is a gap here. What do you say?

Keep in mind that the differentiator is also in what components are accepted from the manufacturer, what custom components their mixed with, and what code is then placed on top of them.

The raw FC comparison most likely would turn up the same, as would a raw disk comparison but if one vendor accepts lower quality batches to reduce cost, or otherwise doesn’t take full advantage of the potential raw performance, that platform will ultimately be slower or prone to more failures.