What does it mean to go BeyondRAID? Going beyond traditional RAID means leaving behind choices between striping and mirroring, limitations on expandability, drive sizing, and drive ordering, among others. BeyondRAID™ technology is the next generation of storage that brings together safety, reliability, expandability, efficiency, and of course ease-of-use. It fits in the same place in the stack as traditional RAID between the file system and the driver. BeyondRAID can be adopted without any change in infrastructure, allowing you to maintain your current file system and operating system and eliminating the friction costs typically associated with moving to a new technology platform. It is RAID in the sense that the technology utilizes a redundant array of independent disks but not in the usual meaning of the acronym.

Standard RAID levels are full of compromises. Do you want striping or mirroring? A two-disk or four-disk set? BeyondRAID is able to solve these issues because it is built on an advanced virtualization platform that allows simultaneous utilization of both striping and mirroring methodologies. BeyondRAID is also adaptive allowing it to respond to different scenarios, such as moving from two disks to three disks, by simply switching from mirroring to both mirroring and striping with parity. Since the technology works at the block level, it can contiguously write blocks of data that alternate between methodologies.

Comparison to RAID
Feature by feature, BeyondRAID consistently beats traditional RAID. BeyondRAID has all the benefits of proven, venerable traditional RAID levels without the limitations. If you already understand how RAID 0, 1, or 5 operates, you understand the fundamentals of BeyondRAID since it relies on the precisely the same underlying data protection methodologies, namely mirroring and striping with parity. The difference is in how BeyondRAID interacts with the storage itself. Applying these protection methods on top of a robust storage virtualization platform removes many of the limitations normally associated with RAID, such as an inability to grow in total capacity or disk set size or the need to keep disks in a particular order.