Raid is obsolete
In a lot of environments.
Peter gives a nice overview why you don't always need to invest in big fat redundant hardware.
We've tackled the topic last year already ..
Now I often get weird looks when I dare to mention that Raid is obsolete ..people fail to hear the "in a lot of environments"
Obviously the catch is in the second part, you won't be doing this for your small shop around the corner with just one machine. You'll only be doing this in an environment where you can work with a redundant array of inexpensive disks. Not with a server that has to sit in a remote and isolated location.
Next to that there are situations where you will be using raid, but not for redundancy, but for disk throughput.
Comments
#1 Brooks : The return of raid
I agree there are cases where raid may not make sense, but the long term problem is cpus are getting more powerful and disk isn't keeping up. So most database servers are io bound these days, wasting those cpu cycles. A good solution to this problem performance gap is raid (assuming those cpu cycles are more valuable the the cost of raid, which may not be true in all cases).
So while others predict the demise of Raid, I will predict the return of raid due to the ever increasing gap of cpu and disk performance.
Until solid state devices take over. Then what is the long performance improvement of SSDs compared to cpus? Will we still need to raid SSDs so they can keep up with the disk?