Performance vs. cost of redundant arrays of inexpensive disks1

Abstract

Data redundancy has been widely used to increase data availability in critical applications and several methods have been proposed to organize redundant data across a disk array. Data redundancy consists of either total data replication or the spreading of the data across the disk array along with parity information which can be used to recover missing data in the event of disk failure. In this paper we present an extended comparative analysis, carried out by using discrete event simulation models, between two disk array architectures: the Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) level 1 architecture, based on data replication; and the RAID level 5 architecture, based on the use of parity information. The comparison takes both performance and cost aspects into account. We study the performance of these architectures simulating two application environments characterized by different sizes of the data accessed by I/O operations. In addition, several scheduling policies for I/O requests are considered and the impact of non-uniform access to data on performance is investigated.