Highly reliable two-dimensional RAID arrays for archival storage

Author

Paris, James ; Schwarz, S. J. Thomas J. E. ; Amer, Aishy ; Long, Darrell D. E.

Author_Institution

Comput. Sci. Dept., Univ. of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

fYear

2012

fDate

1-3 Dec. 2012

Firstpage

324

Lastpage

331

Abstract

We present a two-dimensional RAID architecture that is specifically tailored to the needs of archival storage systems. Our proposal starts with a fairly conventional two-dimensional RAID architecture where each disk belongs to exactly one horizontal and one vertical RAID level 4 stripe. Once the array has been populated, we add a superparity device that contains the exclusive OR of all the contents of all horizontal-or vertical-parity disks. The new organization tolerates all triple disk failures and nearly all quadruple and quintuple disk failures. As a result, it provides mean times to data loss (MTTDLs) more than a hundred times better than those of sets of RAID level 6 stripes with equal capacity and similar parity overhead.

Keywords

disc drives; parallel architectures; MTTDL; RAID architecture; archival storage systems; highly reliable two dimensional RAID arrays; horizontal-or vertical-parity disks; mean times to data loss; quadruple disk failures; quintuple disk failures; redundant array of independent disks; Arrays; Educational institutions; Maintenance engineering; Organizations; Proposals; Reliability; RAID arrays; disk arrays; fault-tolerance; storage system reliability;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC), 2012 IEEE 31st International

Conference_Location

Austin, TX

ISSN

1097-2641

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-4881-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/PCCC.2012.6407774

Filename

6407774