On this episode, we talked about RAID and SSL.
RAID stands for redundant array of independent disks. Companies requiring a decent backup solution, video editors, CAD designers and others use RAID. Today, we covered a few of the many standards available. You can do RAID set up with either 2, 4 or 6 hard drives.
RAID 0: This is a striped array. Let’s imagine you have four hard drives, which are all 1 terabyte in size. If you put the drives into a RAID 0 array, then your computer will see the four hard drives as a big 4 terabyte hard drives. It also has the advantage of combining the speed of your hard drives to give you some super speedy goodness!. Should one of the four hard drives fail, then your data is gone, with only a small chance of getting the data back.
RAID 1: This is a mirrored array. We have our four hard drives again. This means that you will have a copy of your data on all four hard drives. If a hard drive dies, then you can get a new hard drive, plug it in and tell your computer to copy the data to your new hard drive.
RAID 0+1: This combines the speed of RAID 0 with the redundancy of RAID 1. This maybe good, but what if you don’t want to waste the storage space? This is where RAID 5 comes in
RAID 5: essentially, RAID 5 will allow your data to be copied and split between 3 of the four hard drives. The fourth hard drive stores the information required to restore your data should a hard drive fail.
RAID 5+hotspare: It has the functionality of RAID 5. Should one of the hard drives fail, then your computer can copy the data over from the other hard drives to a new hard drives.
Windows and Mac already have software for setting up RAID built right into the OS. On linux, you have to download the software using apt-get.
SSL stands for secure socket layer. It was developed by Netscape. It was the predecessor of TLS(transport layer security). It encrypts things such as usernames, passwords, addresses and other sensitive data.
SSL certificates act as a passport that identifies a company or an individual. When using an internet browser, you will see a padlock icon in your browser’s status bar. In the address bar look for the prefix, HTTPS.
SSL and TLS have both been implemented using open-source software, such as PolarSSL, CyaSSL, Open SSL, Gnu TLS and others.
SSL can be set up in two ways, one-way SSL and two way SSL. With one-way SSL, the server must present a certificate to the client, but the client is not required to present a certificate to the server. The client must authenticate the server, but the server accepts a connection from any client. One-way SSL is common on the Internet where customers want to create secure connections before they share personal data. Often, clients will also use SSL to log on in order that the server can authenticate them.
With two-way SSL (SSL with client authentication), the server presents a certificate to the client and the client presents a certificate to the server. WebLogic Server can be configured to require clients to submit valid and trusted certificates before completing the SSL connection.
To get an SSL certificate, you need to go to companies like GoDaddy or domain.com. These companies will create and issue an SSL certificate. Tune in next time, when we cover CIsco’s iOS and SQL.
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