As mentioned above, Vinum addresses three main deficiencies of traditional disk hardware. This section examines them in more detail. These disks have essentially the same properties as a UNIX disk drive, though there are some minor differences.
Volumes have no size limitations.
Redundant data storage Vinum provides both mirroring and RAID-5. It implements mirroring by providing objects called plexes , each of which is a representation of the data in a volume. A volume may contain between one and eight plexes. From an implementation viewpoint, it is not practical to represent a RAID-5 organization as a collection of plexes. This issue is discussed below.