There are some interesting aspects to reliability. First, are the
[
unified or multiprotocol storage] components
any different? There are a few minor differences, but usually
not a significant difference. In actual practice, "reliability"
tends to be more colored by human actions than failure in
hardware -- either through errors in administration or in the
software written to run on those platforms. In this way,
reliability is influenced by the complexity of the particular
unified storage system. As a system becomes more complex, there
are more opportunities for failures to occur. Consequently, a
complex system will typically have a higher failure rate than a
simple system. Added complexity also increases the possibility
of operational/administrative errors; creating a reliability
problem. Unfortunately, a lot of those "human errors" in
administration are reported as a system or hardware failure.
Ultimately, a unified storage system is generally no more or
less reliable than a dedicated block or file storage platform of
similar complexity.
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