Panasas Commemorates 25th Anniversary of RAID

Panasas, Inc. commemorates 25 years since the publication of A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), the groundbreaking paper that introduced the concept of redundancy for data protection and proposed the fundamental approach to data protection that remains the industry standard today.

Authored by David A. Patterson, Randy H. Katz and Garth Gibson, Panasas founder and chief scientist, the Berkeley RAID Paper, as it has come to be known, was first published in March 1988 during the proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data.

"I would like to take this opportunity to recognize Garth for his definitive contribution to the storage industry. What I find especially remarkable is that the principles unveiled in the Berkeley RAID Paper have formed the underpinnings of modern data protection and systems availability," said Faye Pairman, Panasas CEO. "Twenty-five years later, from benchtop compute tools to high performance, petascale-sized parallel file systems like Panasas offers, the Berkeley RAID Paper set the framework that continues to serve as the foundation for data protection."

The Berkeley RAID Paper detailed the path the storage industry would follow to increase the performance and reliability of storage systems, thereby enabling storage to keep pace with continuing advancements in central processing unit and system memory performance in accordance with Moore’s Law. The redundancy concept introduced by the paper included RAID levels one through five, providing the industry a comprehensive framework with which to tailor the balance of reliability, availability, performance and capacity to individual storage deployments and workloads.

Dr. Gibson noted: "RAID is the framework I have used to organize my work on high-performance, high-reliability, HA and cost-effective storage systems. I am forever surprised and gratified to find young engineers still studying RAID to organize their thoughts on storage systems."

A recent video series featuring Garth Gibson discussing the history of RAID can be viewed here, here and here.

The Berkeley RAID Paper and its authors have earned a host of industry accolades, including the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Awards (1999), the ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award (1999), the SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2011) and the 2012 Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing.