Trading Capacity for Performance in a Disk Array

A variety of performance-enhancing techniques, such as striping, mirroring, and rotational data replication, exist in the disk array literature. Given a fixed budget of disks, one must intelligently choose what combination of these techniques to employ. In this paper, we present a way of designing disk arrays that can flexibly and systematically reduce seek and rotational delay in a balanced manner. We give analytical models that can guide an array designer towards optimal configurations by considering both disk and workload characteristics. We have implemented a prototype disk array that incorporates the configuration models. In the process, we have also developed a robust disk head position prediction mechanism without any hardware support. The resulting prototype demonstrates the effectiveness of the configuration models.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: OSDI
• Authors: Xiang Yu, Benjamin Gum, Yuqun Chen, Randolph Y. Wang, Kai Li, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas E. Anderson
• Keywords: Disk Array, Disk Array Literature, Operating System, OSDI 2000, Prototype Disk Array