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Mirrored and hybrid disk arrays and their reliability

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Abstract

Replication and erasure coding are two alternative methods for disk arrays to deal with disk failures. This work concentrates on mirrored disk arrays, classified as RAID1, and hybrid disk arrays, which implement redundancy by storing XORed data blocks instead of replicas. We evaluate the reliability of disk arrays without and with repair using traditional reliability modeling techniques. A shortcut method based on asymptotic expansions is also used to compare the reliability of RAID(4+k) arrays with mirrored and hybrid disks. RAID1 with distributed redundancy attains more balanced disk loads and improved performance with respect to basic mirroring (BM) upon disk failure, but is less reliable than BM. Hybrid disk arrays incurring the same level of redundancy as RAID1 are more reliable than RAID1, but incur a higher cost for updates. The application of the asymptotic expansion method to hierarchical RAID shows that it is advantageous to associate higher redundancy with lower levels at the same overall redundancy overhead. It is also shown that sharing disk space sharing between RAID1 and RAID5 in heterogeneous disk arrays—HDAs may result in a lowered reliability. In addition to the classical rebuild model, we present an extension with a limited number of spares. Recovery methods based on reconfiguration from higher to lower reliability RAID arrays are also presented.

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Notes

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive.

Abbreviations

BM:

Basic mirroring

CD:

Chained declustering

CTMC:

Continuous time Markov chain

GRD:

Group rotate declustering

HDA:

Heterogeneous disk array

HRAID:

Hierarchical RAID

ID:

Interleaved declustering

LSI:

LSI logics’ RAID array

MTTF:

Mean time to failure

MTTR:

Mean time to repair

MTTDL:

Mean time to data loss

PDS:

Parity defining set (for Weaver codes)

RAID:

Redundant array of independent disks

SADA:

Self-adaptive disk array

SSPiRAL:

Survivable storage using parity in redundant array layouts

XOR:

eXclusive-OR

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Acknowledgements

Dr. Jun Xu at NJIT and Dr. Yujie Tang at Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology: www.siat.ac.cn collaborated on research topics covered in this paper.

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    Alexander Thomasian

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Thomasian, A. Mirrored and hybrid disk arrays and their reliability. Cluster Comput 22 (Suppl 1), 2485–2494 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-018-2127-x

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