TRAP-Array: A Disk Array Architecture Providing Timely Recovery to Any Point-in-time

RAID architectures have been used for more than two decades to recover data upon disk failures. Disk failure is just one of the many causes of damaged data. Data can be damaged by virus attacks, user errors, defective software/firmware, hardware faults, and site failures. The risk of these types of data damage is far greater than disk failure with today’s mature disk technology and networked information services. It has therefore become increasingly important for today’s disk array to be able to recover data to any point in time when such a failure occurs. This paper presents a new disk array architecture that provides Timely Recovery to Any Point-in-time, referred to as TRAP-Array. TRAP-Array stores not only the data stripe upon a write to the array, but also the time-stamped Exclusive-ORs of successive writes to each data block. By leveraging the Exclusive-OR operations that are performed upon each block write in today’s RAID4/5 controllers, TRAP does not incur noticeable perf...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Qing Yang, Weijun Xiao, Jin Ren
• Keywords: Data Damage, Disk Array, Disk Failure, Hardware, ISCA 2006