Highly Reliable Two-Dimensional RAID Arrays for Archival Storage

Appeared in 31st IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference.

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.

Publication date:
December 2012

Authors:
Jehan-François Pâris
Thomas Schwarz
Ahmed Amer
Darrell D. E. Long

Projects:
Archival Storage
Reliable Storage

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{paris-ipccc12,
  author       = {Jehan-François Pâris and Thomas Schwarz and Ahmed Amer and Darrell D. E. Long},
  title        = {Highly Reliable Two-Dimensional {RAID} Arrays for Archival Storage},
  booktitle    = {31st IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference},
  month        = dec,
  year         = {2012},
}