RAID
RAID: Redundant Arrays of
Independent Disks
disk
organization techniques that manage a large numbers of disks, providing a view
of a single disk of high reliability by storing data redundantly, so that data
can be recovered even if a disk fails. The chance that some disk out of a set
of N disks will fail is much higher
than the chance that a specific single disk will fail.
E.g.,
a system with 100 disks, each with MTTF of 100,000 hours (approx. 11 years),
will have a system MTTF of 1000 hours (approx. 41 days)
o
Techniques for using redundancy to avoid data loss are critical with large
numbers of disks
Originally
a cost-effective alternative to large, expensive disks. o I in RAID originally
stood for ―inexpensive‘‘
o Today RAIDs are used for their higher
reliability and bandwidth. The ―I‖ is interpreted as independent
Improvement
of Reliability via Redundancy
Redundancy
– store extra information that can be used to rebuild information lost in a
disk failure.
E.g.,
Mirroring (or shadowing)
o
Duplicate every disk. Logical disk consists of two physical disks. o Every
write is carried out on both disks
Reads
can take place from either disk
o
If one disk in a pair fails, data still available in the other
Data
loss would occur only if a disk fails, and its mirror disk also fails before
the system is repaired.
Prob
ability of combined event is very small o Except for dependent failure modes
such as fire or building collapse or electrical power surges.
Mean
time to data loss depends on mean time to failure, and mean time to repair. o
E.g. MTTF of 100,000 hours, mean time to repair of 10 hours
gives
mean time to data loss of 500*106 hours (or 57,000 years) for a mirrored pair
of disks (ignoring dependent failure modes)
Improvement
in Performance via Parallelism
o
Two main goals of parallelism in a disk system:
1. Load
balance multiple small accesses to increase throughput
2. Parallelize
large accesses to reduce response time.
o
Improve transfer rate by striping data across multiple disks.
o
Bit-level striping – split the bits of each byte across multiple disks
In
an array of eight disks, write bit i
of each byte to disk i.
Each
access can read data at eight times the rate of a single disk.
But
seek/access time worse than for a single disk
Bit
level striping is not used much any more
o
Block-level striping – with n disks,
block i of a file goes to disk (i mod n) + 1
Requests
for different blocks can run in parallel if the blocks reside on different
disks. A request for a long sequence of blocks can utilize all disks in
parallel.
RAID Levels
o
Schemes to provide redundancy at lower cost by using disk striping combined
with parity bits. Different RAID organizations, or RAID levels, have differing
cost, performance and reliability
RAID
Level 0: Block striping; non-redundant.
o
Used in high-performance applications where data lost is not critical.
RAID Level 1: Mirrored disks with block striping. o
Offers best write performance.
o Popular for applications such as
storing log files in a database system. RAID Level 2: Memory-Style
Error-Correcting-Codes (ECC) with bit striping.
RAID Level 5: Block-Interleaved Distributed
Parity; partitions data and parity NOTES
among all N + 1 disks, rather than
storing data in N disks and parity in
1 disk.
o
E.g., with 5 disks, parity block for nth
set of blocks is stored on disk (n mod
5) + 1, with the data
blocks
stored on the other 4 disks. o Higher I/O rates than Level 4. Block writes
occur in parallel if the blocks and their parity blocks are on different disks.
o Subsumes Level 4: provides same benefits, but avoids bottleneck of parity
disk. RAID Level 6: P+Q Redundancy scheme; similar to Level 5, but stores extra
redundant information to guard against multiple disk failures. o Better
reliability than Level 5 at a higher cost; not used as widely.
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