Question

Difficulty: MediumResilience, High Availability, and Redundancy

An organization is redesigning its database architecture to maintain continuous uptime for a critical online transaction system. The system requires continuous availability even if an entire database server experiences a hardware controller or motherboard failure. The infrastructure team suggests installing a hardware RAID 10 array on a single database server, claiming this will meet the high availability requirement without needing additional server nodes. Which of the following best explains why this proposed solution fails to satisfy the requirement?

  1. RAID 10 provides storage disk fault tolerance on a single system, but it cannot prevent system downtime caused by a total server hardware failure.Answer
  2. B
    RAID 10 relies on parity calculations that create excessive write latency, preventing real-time database transaction processing during a failover event.
  3. C
    RAID arrays function primarily as an asynchronous backup mechanism, requiring manual disk image restoration following a host outage.
  4. D
    RAID 10 is classified as a detective security control intended for integrity verification rather than a high availability mechanism.

Answer

RAID 10 provides storage disk fault tolerance on a single system, but it cannot prevent system downtime caused by a total server hardware failure.
High availability requires removing single points of failure across all infrastructure components. While RAID 10 protects against the failure of individual hard drives or solid-state drives within a chassis, the server itself remains a single point of failure. If the server motherboard, power supply, or RAID controller fails, the database becomes completely unavailable. To achieve host-level resilience, the architecture must include multi-node redundancy, such as a high-availability database cluster.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the availability requirement in the scenario.
The system must survive a total host hardware failure (e.g., motherboard or power supply crash) without system downtime.
High availability at the host level requires multi-node clustering or failover redundancy.
2
Evaluate the capabilities and limits of RAID 10.
RAID 10 combines disk mirroring and striping to tolerate individual drive failures within a single server chassis.
RAID operates strictly at the local storage layer and cannot keep services online if the host machine itself powering the RAID controller crashes.
3
Select the option that correctly identifies the single point of failure.
Highlighting that local drive redundancy does not eliminate server-level single points of failure directly addresses the gap in the proposal.
True high availability against server outages requires redundant physical nodes, such as active-active or active-passive database clustering.

Key Concept

High Availability vs. Storage Redundancy
Estimated Time:1m 15s
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