* Data Integrity Initiative
Last week at Storage Networking World, four storage vendors announced an initiative to ensure data integrity and prevent data corruption in Oracle databases running on storage-area networks.
Emulex, Oracle, Seagate and LSI introduced the Data Integrity Initiative (DII), which focuses on a standard approach for error checking for data integrity in Oracle database environments. DII is a successor to Oracle’s Hardware Assisted Resilient Data (HARD), which was supported by EMC, HP, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Network Appliance, Sun and Veritas (now Symantec).
The new DII initiative seeks to implement a low-level hardware validation within each component of the SAN infrastructure. That would be in the Linux operating system, the host bus adapter, the Fibre Channel fabric, the storage array and the disk drive.
In DII, each component would employ standardized data checking mechanisms to allow it to monitor the integrity of both in-flight and at-rest data. The technology, not only detects where corruption occurred, but isolates it and reports on the sources of errors, thus avoiding the eventual finger pointing among vendors in their attempts to solve the problem.
Emulex, Oracle, Seagate and LSI say that implementing DII will require changes to hardware, which will take place as early as next year. The DII and any specification that could result is housed in the ANSI T10 Data Integrity Field working group.
Seagate has claimed credit for ‘thinking’ up the specification.
Editor’s Note: Is your IT organizational structure holding your company back?
We’re assembling a package of stories to be published in Network World looking at the IT organizational structure of the future and we need your help:News Editor Bob Brown
* If your company has recently reorganized in light of new business and technology challenges and opportunities, can you send along “before” and “after” org charts? (Feel free to strip out the names, we’re really just looking for titles. But give us a sense of the size of your IT organization/business.) Can you tell us how the reorganization has worked out?
* If your company is in need of an IT org makeover, what areas are currently most dysfunctional?
* Any advice on what your peers can do to improve their IT organizations right now?
We’re looking to tap into our readership through a technique some call “crowdsourcing.” Knowing we don’t have all the answers, but that our audience probably has a lot of them, we’re hoping to help you help each other.
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