ISM3004 Tutorial Blog 4: The different basic RAID types

ISM3004 Tutorial Blog 4

The different basic RAID types

by: Courtney Jeffries

In my final blog post for ISM3004, I would like to discuss the differences of basic RAID types. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks and it is designed to increase storage and reliability through redundancy.

RAID 0- this is the simplest RAID level, and it does not involve redundancy. Without redundancy, this level has the best overall performance characteristics of the single levels, especially when it comes to cost. It has become inscreasingly popular for performance seekers.

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RAID 1- this level uses mirroring, meaning its drive has data duplicated on two different drives. If one drive fails, the other continues to function. It is popular for people who want fault tolerance and do not care as much about performance.

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RAID 2- with this level, very high data transfer rates are possible. It works by splitting the data at the bit level and spreading it over multiple redundancy and data disks. It is rarely used today because of high costs and it requires many drives.

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RAID 3- data is striped across multiple disks at byte level. Parity is also calculated and sent to a parity disk.

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RAID 4- this level improves performance by striping data across multiple disks in blocks, it also provides fault tolerance through a parity disk. It is like RAID 3 except that instead of bytes, it uses blocks. From byte to block striping improves access performance.

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RAID 5- this is one of the most popular levels, it stripes both data and parity information across atleast three drives. It is similar to RAID 4 except that it can exchange the dedicated parity drice for a distrubuted parity algorithm, which writes data and parity blocks across all of the drives used. It has improved writing performance allowing better parallelism. Fault tolerance is also maintained.

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RAID 6- this level is basically RAID 5 plus more. It stripes blocks of data and parity across many drives except that is calculates two sets of parity information. The goal is solely to improve fault tolerance. It can handle failure of and two drives while other levels can handle one fault at most. It is worse than RAID 5 in terms of writes because of the added overhead of more parity calculations, but it may be slightly faster.

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Secure Email Project Blog; ISM3004; Courtney Jeffries

Secure Email Project Blog; ISM3004

by: Courtney Jeffries

Here is a screen capture of my Thunderbird inbox:

Web Article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/politics/12hackers.html?_r=2

This article talks about a group of hackers that hacked into the computers of HBGary Federal, which is a security company that sells investigation services to other companies. The wikileaks hackers posted tens of thousands of emails that appeared to be of HBGary's internal company, on the internet. It looked as if these documents contained information for ways to undermine adversaries of Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; for example posting fake background research on their critics to embarrass them.

A spokesperson for Bank of America said they had never hired HBGary and were unaware of the presentations that were made involving them. Since these hacked e-mails were on a file-sharing network, blogs have been retrieving and discussing them all over the internet, as well as in The New York Times.

A power-point presentation was also released that claimed that three companies, HBGary, Palantir Technologies, and Berico Technologies were coming together to attack Wikileaks, who were rumored to have internal e-mails from Bank of America. The three companies planned to submit fake documents to Wikileaks and then expose them as forgeries. Other documents proposed ways to embarrass adversaries of the Chamber of Commerce, asking for an initial $200,000 and later $2 million. These e-mails revealed the chamber's opposition to the Obama healthcare plan.

HBGary made the statement that it had been a victim of a cyberattack and the documents found had been falsified. The two other businesses that were mentioned along side of HBGary put out statements to distance themselves from HBGary Federal, but did not say whether or not the documents were fake.

The article ends with a quote from chamber spokesperson Tom Collamore saying, "The leaked e-mails appear to show that HBGary Federal was willing to propose questionable actions in an attempt to drum up business, but the chamber was not aware of these proposals until HBGary’s e-mails leaked".

This article proves the point that it is important to secure your e-mail to protect important information that you may not want others to know about!

My Avatar, ISM3004, Courtney Jeffries

My Avatar, ISM3004

Courtney Jeffries

Creating my avatar was a fun experience. I tried out a couple of the different sites listed, but decided that I liked Doppelme the best. I found this site easy to use, and you did not have to sign up in order to create your avatar which I liked. I had never created an avatar before, but this site was not complicated at all which was helpful for me. After comparing it to a few other sites I found it to be the simplest one to use. Here is my Avatar:



I created her to resemble myself with long and wavy brown hair, green eyes, and I put her in an outfit that I would also wear! Overall, I am happy with the way that she turned out!