New RAID standard expected

All storage vendors promise open standards and interoperability. A great irony in storage is that even though disk drives and RAID controllers follow strict standards regarding interoperability, there's no standard dictating a common data format. Move the disks away from that specific (or similar) RAID card, and your files become unreadable.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has made RAID compatibility its target for quite some time, promoting the idea of a common RAID format as a basic interchange structure among different vendors.

The official SNIA acronym for this is DDF (Disk Data Format), and we should see the first interoperability tests later this year. An updated draft of the DDF specs is on the SNIA Web site and among other things, adds support for RAID 6.