> This article is basically advocating RAID 5 across many storage providers.
That is correct. And to be more precise, I'm advocating RAID 5 across storage providers as a service, so people who just want to store data don't have to manage anything.
That is correct. And to be more precise, I'm advocating RAID 5 across storage providers as a service, so people who just want to store data don't have to manage anything.
> That is correct.
The diagram in the article and text description is RAID 1+0 aka RAID 10.
If you'd like to talk more about this, send me an email (address in profile).
If you simply rely on "dumb disks" spread across multiple providers to provide availability, then you may be interested in looking at the nova-volumes part of openstack (it provides block storage attached to nova VMs). As part of openstack, it's an open system that is seeing rapid adoption.
However, one of the most-requested features for swift is to provide support for logical clusters that span a wide geographic area. This could potentially allow multiple providers to collaborate in providing a multi-provider storage system. However, I'd guess that the technical problems are much simpler than the business problems in setting up multi-provider clusters.
At scale, this could be managed, I think, through a combination of (a) shipping hard drives around, (b) caching, and (c) peering between storage providers. For example, shipping hard drives around would be expedient if you wanted to switch out a raw storage provider. The optimal strategy also depends on the access patterns and latency requirements.
It seems solvable, but not trivial.