Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID)

From Business Continuity Management (BCM) and Disaster Recovery (DR) Wiki Glossary

1. Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks or RAID is a group of disks that is configured to appear as a single disk drive to the host. These independent disks or RAID uses many smaller disks instead of using one large disk to store data, because this is a less expensive approach to using many low-cost drives as a group to improve performance, yet also provides a degree of redundancy that makes the chance of data loss remote. Related Terms: Mirroring, Duplexing, Resilient Storage Implementation, Data Protection/Recovery Strategy - Category. BCMBoK Competency Level BCMBoK 4: Recovery Strategy CL 5: Advanced (DR)

(Source: Business Continuity Management Institute - BCM Institute)

2. A way of storing the same data over multiple physical disks to ensure that if a hard disk fails a redundant copy of the data can be accessed instead. Example schemes include mirroring and RAID–5.

(Source: Microsoft Storage Glossary)

3. A mechanism for providing data resilience for computer systems using mirrored arrays of magnetic disks.Different levels of RAID can be applied to provide for greater resilience.

(Source: OGC, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3)