tRAID RC1 - Transparent RAID (by FlexRAID developer) is out.

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SirMaster

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http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php/topic,2319.0.html

Been waiting for this and really interested in trying this one out and migrating my RAID-F FlexRAID arary to it in the future possibly.

Here is an older comparison about the differences between FlexRAID RAID-F which a lot of you are probably familar with (RAID over Filesystem) and the new tRAID (Transparent RAID)

http://openegg.org/2013/02/21/flexraids-raid-f-vs-nzfs/

Time to get to some VM testing for me.

From the thread:

Without further ado, presenting: Transparent RAID™ (tRAID™). :)

What is Transparent RAID™ (tRAID™)?

Transparent RAID is a storage protection scheme in which drives behave as if not part of a RAID. Each drive can be partitioned, formatted, pooled into a larger volume, and whatnot as usual.
Nevertheless, parity is computed transparently to enable data recovery in the event a drive failure.
Additionally, new drives being protected can be added while preserving their existing data.
This makes it easy to add and remove a drive from the protective array.
So, you get all of the protection benefit of RAID without actually running in RAID mode and none of the restrictions!

How did we accomplish this?
Transparent RAID uses the same technology as VMware does to virtualize its storage devices.
The key aspect of this virtualization approach is support for passthrough devices.

Storage Pooling
By design, tRAID has no concept of storage pooling, and you can effectively use it without any storage pooling.
You can read/write from/to the individual transparent drives and parity is captured transparently.
Nonetheless, tRAID comes with a new Storage Pooling technology, which is enabled by default.

In all, you will have several options with tRAID:
Run without pooling:
In this mode, each drive is effectively standalone.
Run with native pooling for tRAID (default and recommended):
Unlike the storage pooling in RAID-F, the native pooling for TRAID does not use mounted drives.
Instead, it pools the drives by interacting with the file system (NTFS or other) driver directly and by accessing the raw volumes.
This makes for a much lighter-weight and robust solution. More on this later.
Run with RAID-F pooling:
You can use any storage pooling solution already on the market including RAID-F's storage pooling if those fit your needs more appropriately.

Installation
Transparent RAID is a feature borrowed from the NZFS RAID stack.
As such, you will be installing a very restricted version of NZFS.
The UI, Service Broker, and Kernel Engine have been crippled to only allow you to do tRAID related operations.

There are two packages to install:
The host deployment package:
The host package is just a zip file that you unzip to a directory where you want the service broker to run from.
Once unzipped, you simply right-click on the "install.bat" file and run it as administrator.

The following rules apply:
You must reboot your system after installing.
Moreover, you MUST reboot before uninstalling and after uninstalling. The uninstall script must also be run as administrator.
The Web Client administration application:
The client application installs the same way you install FlexRAID RAID-F (execute the EXE and follow the screens).
You only need one client application install to manage multiple hosts. In fact, you should never manage the same host from multiple clients.

Wiki
http://wiki.flexraid.com/category/traid/

RC1 Release

Completed UI features:
Creating RAID
Deploying RAID
Verifying RAID
Restoring RAID (including being able to restore to PPU)
RAID Expansion
RAID Contraction
Automatic RAID Restoration from Global Hot-Spare
RAID Import by Host Scanning
Native Storage Pooling for tRAID
Configuration Override (to easily simulate recovery scenarios and to execute advanced operations)
Scheduled Configuration DB Backup to Directory & to Email
Powerful Enterprise Level Scheduler
SMART Monitoring
Dashboard & Charts
Alerts (email, SMS, & Sound)
UI Themes: 9 to choose from

Download:
Host Package http://download.openegg.org/temp/traid/NZFS-TRAID-HOST-RC1.zip
Client Installer http://download.openegg.org/temp/traid/NZFS-TRAID-CLIENT-RC1.exe
Torrent http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2319.0;attach=1719 (thanks JuggalotusHeat)

Quick Notes
User/Password: admin/admin
After adding a host to manage onto the UI, activate by requesting a trial
Known Issues
- Trial licenses are invalidated when you uninstall the WebUI. Re-requesting the trial will work.
- If a host machine is restarted while the WebUI in active in your browser, you must refresh on the host's node in the WebUI to update of its status. That or refresh your browser to reload the WebUI.
- A few UI features still need to be completed (username/password change and the notification panel at the top still needs to be wired to the backend)

Important notes
Do use any RAID-F RAID (Snapshot RAID nor RT RAID) on tRAID as that would be redundant.
When initializing your tRAID array, your source drives will be placed in offline mode. Do not ever attempt to revive them from that state.
tRAID puts the source drives in offline mode and then presents itself to the OS as being the drives placed in offline mode.
Switching the source drives from offline mode will confuse the OS and might lead to data corruption as the OS will be seeing two drives pretending to be the same device.

Performance
The default configuration in RC1 represents the best case scenario for data integrity and the worst case scenario for performance.
What we mean by that is that we have crippled the performance of tRAID in favor of data integrity. In many cases, we have gone to the extreme.
Now, fear not! A few configuration changes in the UI will bring back some of that robbed performance once we all get comfortable with the new platform.

The reason behind all this is to create a safer introduction to Transparent RAID.
RAID, whether it be software RAID or hardware RAID has some inherent vulnerabilities when implemented without battery backup.
So, in accounting for power failures or system crashes, we have setup the default configuration to be as resilient as possible.

The performance tweaks should be enabled only after one's system has been tested stable under tRAID.
 
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I've been testing this since it came out and it's been working pretty well so far. There have been issues and they are being resolved one by one.

After functionality testing is more or less more complete, the plan is to move onto performance tweaking. Performance is already pretty acceptable as is, but some tweaking will make it great.

I was naturally interested in tRAID as I have been a RAID-F FlexRAID user for almost a year now.

tRAID is really only part of a product. It's clearly a by-product of Brahim's ultimate goal of NZFS. tRAID is the underlying RAID engine for NZFS, but with some additional restrictions and less functionality.

For example, tRAID is currently limited to 2 parity disks, but there should be options for more with different licenses and with the future with NZFS. Also, tRAID doesn't do bit-rot detection, that would be done by a yet to be completed data watcher process that would be part of the NZFS package once that software package is fully realized.

It's pretty clear to me that this is a very iterative process. First, with RAID-F focusing on the parity mathematics and how that all works. And implementing storage pooling.

tRAID expands upon those concepts, moving from filesystem RAID to kernel-level RAID on the block-level. Keeping a lot of the same storage pooling techniques.

Then NZFS will come and be built on top of the new tRAID foundation and add in additional data integrety and services to babysit your data and your parity and ensure it's always what you are expecting it to be.

I have not actually used unRAID myself, but this seems to be an unRAID killer to me. It allows the same things like any size disks (parity has to be largest), disks being able to be used independently from the array outside the system.

It supports live re-construction of data in the event of a disk failure. It supports cool things like if you have 2 parity disks, and you lose one data disk, rather than run in degraded mode, you can convert one of the parity disks into the data disk so you can get out of degraded mode but still maintain some level of parity protection. It's similar to a hot spare I suppose, though tRAID supports hot spares too.

For me the fact that unRAID only supports 1 parity disk and tRAID thus far supports 2 and in the future more, is the "killer" feature to me. That and since it runs on Windows is pretty nice for how I like to run my setup. I can avoid having to manage virtualization to accomplish everything I want with a single server.

Is it the unRAID killer yet for everyone? Perhaps not, but It's certainly a large stepping stone to NZFS, which I think certainly will be.


Note, I am just an average user of the software and this post is my own opinion and my own summary of what seems to be going on in the FlexRAID world. I appologize to Brahim if some of the info is misinterpreted or misrepresented or if any of my speculation does not match up to the future.

Anyways, I encourage anyone interested to start giving tRAID a try (even just on a virtual machine), they could always use more testing. You can help tRAID and NZFS to reach it's ultiumate goal and it can only become stronger and more robust through additional testing and usage.
 
I actually just started using FlexRAID for the snapshot raid on my HTPC a few months ago. It's very useful aside from annoying limitations such as open files utterly stopping any operation. I am very anxious to see what updates have been brought to the table with the new versions. Does the RC version of tRAID also have the RAID-F functionality?

I'm more holding off tRAID and others until NZFS gets stood up, then I think I'd get more excited. tRAID seems like too much of an in between product to the other offerings to come.
 
DermicSavage said:
I actually just started using FlexRAID for the snapshot raid on my HTPC a few months ago. It's very useful aside from annoying limitations such as open files utterly stopping any operation. I am very anxious to see what updates have been brought to the table with the new versions. Does the RC version of tRAID also have the RAID-F functionality?

I'm more holding off tRAID and others until NZFS gets stood up, then I think I'd get more excited. tRAID seems like too much of an in between product to the other offerings to come.
Click to expand...

I know what you mean, tRAID does seem like an in-between product. I was planning to move from RAID-F to tRAID, but I may hold off until NZFS like you said. But I'm still going to continue helping in the testing. I come from a software background (Software Engineer myself) so I feel that I'm able to give some good input into the testing. I would love nothing more than to see NZFS be a huge success, especually because I think it's the perfect storage solution for me. So I am doing what I can now to help find bugs in the in-between product so that when NZFS finally comes around it will be great and well-tested.

Brahim has said that he will be porting a bunch of newer tRAID improvements over to a free update to RAID-F. Like storage pool improvements and other things.

Elpee said:
Can you tell us some tweaking you have done, SirMaster?
Click to expand...

I haven't done any tweaks or anything. I have just been testing all the features, live reconstruction, restoring, expansion, etc. Helping Brahim find issues. Brahim has asked that we not worry about performance yet and to focus on reliability and stability and features for the time being.

He has already promised an in-depth disscussion on performance tweaking will take place after the stability and features are tested and stable.
 
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Personally no. I saw that I had a chance to do a complete data migration (got access to enough temp space from a friend)

I evaluated what I personally wanted and needed from a storage system and ended up moving to ZFS.

I used tRAID up until around the end of the RC helping the developer find bugs and things.

I still think tRAID is a good option depending on your needs. I have a buddy who bought it and runs it.

If you want realtime RAID. And want to be able to add 1 drive at a time for expansion, and want each drive to work outside the system on it's own for various reasons. Also if you really want a Windows environment. tRAID still has a compelling feature set. It's a lot better than Storage Spaces and a lot more flexible than hardware RAID.

At this point it's a better unRAID. Similar pricing, 2 parity vs only 1 parity with unRAID, and uses a more common filesystem NTFS and soon EXT4 when the linux version comes out.
 
Don't knock unRAID until you're tried it, it's an extremely solid product.
 
I guess, I just don't think 1 parity drive is enough, especially for more than 10TB when using consumer quality drives.
 
SirMaster said:
I guess, I just don't think 1 parity drive is enough, especially for more than 10TB when using consumer quality drives.
Click to expand...

Yeah, unRAID is a dinosaur. It was good in its time, but it is outdated and has been surpassed by other solutions, particularly SnapRAID and FlexRAID.
 
FYI, lot of new features were added to tRAID including Storage Acceleration, which was the last planned feature.

This essentially resolves the last aspect of performance concerns associate with the approach.
 
Congrats Brahim on the milestone for tRAID. The product has really been coming together since the first RC. Bugs fixed, features added and performance really turbo-charged. You certainly delivered on your promises :)

Even though I have personally migrated away from FlexRAID (at least for now). I still recommend it to friends and other people depending on their needs.
 
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