Reliability analysis of an energy-aware RAID system

We develop a mathematical model - MREED - to quantitatively evaluate the failure rate of energy-efficient parallel storage systems. The Power-Aware Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disk (PARAID) aims to reduce energy use of commodity server-class disks without specialized hardware. The goal of PARAID is to skewed striping pattern to adapt to the system load by changing the number of powered disks. By spinning down disks during light workloads, PARAID can reduce power consumption, while still meeting performance demands. We show that MREED can be used to estimate a five-disk PARAID-0 system. We validate the accuracy of MREED using the DiskSim simulator. Our approach shows that MREED can rely on file access pattern to estimate system utilization correctly. Furthermore, even thought PARAID may achieve reasonable reliability, our model shows that PARAID´s reliability is affected by data locality.