A quick note of caution (and someone from Netapp, feel free to speak up).
Netapp has a patent on triple parity raid (c.f.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7640484.html). A quick look over this,
suggests that the major innovation is the layout and computation which
they simplified in a particular manner. That is, I don't think their
patent covers triple parity RAID in general, but does cover their
implementation, and the diagonal parity with anti-diagonal parity
(effectively counter propagating or orthogonalized parity).
I am not sure what this means from a coding sense, other than not to use
their techniques without a license to do so. If Netapp wants to grant
such a license, this would be good, but I suspect that it wouldn't be
quite as simple as this.
Just a note so that we don't encounter problems. I think its very
possible to avoid their IP, as it would somewhat hard to claim ownership
of the Galois Field math behind RAID calculations. They can (and do)
claim a particular implementation and algorithm.
[also not trying to open the patent on code wars here, just pointing out
the current situation ]
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics, Inc.
email: landman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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http://scalableinformatics.com/sicluster
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