Kirkland, Washington-based Seek Systems Inc says the April release date for its Adapt-ive Raid Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks controller and subsystem has slipped and it is unlikely to ship until the summer (CI No 2,895). The privately-owned company says it was over-ambitious with its release date. Adaptive Raid dynamically manages block sizes of disks, avoiding the need to reconfigure block sizes as each disk is added. Current RAID arrays require system administrators to choose between high-transaction performance and high- throughput performance by defining RAID groups and levels according to Seek, and once set, the configuration remains static and is unable to respond to a change in workload or new applications. Changing the RAID level for performance tuning, or capacity to accommodate growing databases or applications, requires data to be moved off disks, the new configuration set and the data moved back on to the disks. Adaptive Raid sidesteps this problem, claims Seek, removing the need to understand RAID levels. Decisions on which levels to use for storing data are taken by Adaptive Raid, automatically and dynamically minimizing response times for applications. Disk space usage is also optimized and new disks added transparently without impacting normal operations. At the core of Adaptive Raid is an intelligent controller combining hardware and embedded software. Each controller is able to manage an array of up to sixty-four disks. Patented algorithms dynamically determine which RAID level gives the highest performance based on sensing the write type: small or large block, rand-om or sequential. As well as minimizing response times, performance gains are derived from the elimination of the RAID level 5 write penalty. Adaptive Raid manages additional disks to redistribute existing data and parity to continually take advantage of the increased space and performance capability. The increased number of disk actuators dynamical ly restripe the new capacity to preserve the maximum number of disks for a given capacity. Prices are expected from $1,500.
