In previous blog posts, we discussed the concepts of Mean Time Between Failure in comparison to Mean Time To Failure as well as the risk of security breaches from hard disks in photocopiers being discarded carelessly.
That triggered questions about reliability of storage systems. To fully address this issue, two terms need to be defined: data integrity and hardware reliability.
Data integrity is when all characteristics of the data including business rules, rules for how pieces of data relate, dates, definitions and lineage must be correct for data to be complete.
Data integrity is the overall goal, whereas, hardware reliability is one factor in how this goal is achieved.[i]
A reliable hardware system does not silently continue and deliver results that include uncorrected corrupted data, instead it corrects the corruption when possible or else stops and reports the corruption to the user.
Mean Time Between Data Loss (MTBDL) is used to convey data integrity statistics while Mean Time Between Failure (MTTF) is used to convey hardware reliability.
