Data corruption is worse than you know

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Opportunity for software designers, maybe ...

Maybe this is an opportunity for software designers to create and implement data integrity applications similar to the rise of security applications that are all the rage today.

By and large, most software today does not have any data integrity logic built into it. Data is assumed to be correctly handled by the underlying I/O routines and the hardware. But we all know that there are data integrity problems with both the operating systems and the hardware, it's just that nobody ever does anything about it.

Part of the reason is training and education; current computer science training doesn't spend much time on data integrity. When you talk to people trained in the '60s and '70s, this was a much higher priority. Storage mediums like cards, tape, and early disk systems were physically prone to errors (tape stretching, card jamming, disk head misalignment). Programmers learned and used techniques like parity and CRC checking, redundant data groups, and other data recovery algorithms. Today, everybody expects the OS or the hardware to do it all automatically.

A big factor in the failure is the loose standard of the PC architecture. It's impossible for vendors to do rigorous integration testing of components and subsystems in today's markets, there are so many combinations and variants, and testing adds costs that people aren't willing to pay. The same is true for disk vendors. They are under incredible price pressures even as they roll out new technical innovations every few years. Size matters, quality is a distant second concern.

Finally, Microsoft bears some of the blame for this problem, because they refuse to acknowledge it. I did a simple demonstration for our CIO awhile back, when he was deciding if we would use Windows or Unix/Linux for our server architecture. I set up a Windows server and a Unix server and ran our software to generate a load on the systems. Then I took a data CD, scratched it with a car key, and put it in the drive on the Windows server. Windows promptly locked up for several minutes while it tried to read the scratched disk, freezing all access to the software application. Then I put the scratched CD in the Unix system, and after a few seconds, a window popped up on the console informing us of an error reading the CD, while the system kept humming along. It took the CIO about 30 seconds to make the platform decision ...

Posted by: terry flores   Posted on: 09/18/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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