Blog | SEAGATE Adapt Technology: Rapid Rebuild

The Seagate ADAPT – Automatic Distributed Allocation Protection Technology – is a unique feature that looks to keep data safe and accessible whenever and wherever needed. It looks to replace traditional RAID types through the protection scheme of distributing parities across larger HDDs or SSDs.

This technology pushed IT product development and allowed for data protection to be at a higher capacity, with rebuilds of up to 95% faster than with traditional solutions. ADAPT also makes things easier for system administrators, with infrastructure that is easier to maintain and expand, as well as being more scalable and flexible.

Capacity affects Data Protection

Today, enterprises rely a lot more heavily on data – from data relating to daily operations to data that provides analytical information that helps to create competitive advantages in the industry. There is a constant evolving trend of technology in ensuring that data is highly safe and accessible, especially during regular system downtimes or even in unforeseeable events of system failure.

Applications are creating larger files, with a proportionally increase in network storage needs. In addition, the acceleration of CPU speeds have outstripped the transfer rates of data towards storage media, creating bottlenecks in today’s systems.

With the solution of integrating multiple drives into a single array – viewed as a single disk drive by the network operating system – enterprises now have access to a more cost-effective, mini computer-sized solutions of up to a terabyte or more of storage.

Raid Technology

RAID was mainly optimised for environment use within finite or limited storage capacity. However, now companies look to implement high capacity storage solutions paired with the same high level protection expected from RAID.

But with traditional RAID types, the overall system performance is subject to slowing down significantly due to rebuilds increasing storage capacity. This is from data being striped across multiple drives with parity information. When a drive in a RAID fails, parity information is utilised by the controller to assist the reconstruction of data from the failed drive onto a spare drive.

Unfortunately, the speeds of the system being rebuilt is traditionally paired with the performance of a single HDD, in some cases this will amount to over 50 hours.

Seagate’s ADAPT technology solves this rebuild challenge by distributing the rebuild to many drives within the RAID system which helps to provide a performance boost of multiple drives. As an intelligent solution, simplifying the integration of high-capacity drives in RAID systems without sacrificing reliable data availability.

The table above indicates the calculated numbers relating to performance impacts and the rebuilt times for a RAID 6 disk group against ADAPT disk groups of 24, 56, and 106 drives. The main takeaways – the larger the ADAPT disk group size, the greater the acceleration of data protection benefits. With a reduction in the amount of time of the disk group surviving a third drive failure – being over 55 hours to only 25 minutes in the 106 drive ADAPT group.

RAID systems are made to provide protection against drive failure, however ADAPT provides an increased level of protection against drive failure. In the case of a RAID system failing, this would be a great solution towards improving the time taken in restoring the system back into a fully fault-tolerant state.

Seagate systems – Nytro X and Exos X – help to eliminate much capacity-performance challenges through their integrated ADAPT technology.

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