Orthogonal Striping and Mirroring in Distributed RAID for I/O-Centric Cluster Computing

This paper presents a new distributed disk-array architecture for achieving high I/O performance in scalable cluster computing. In a serverless cluster of computers, all distributed local disks can be integrated as a distributed-software redundant array of independent disks (ds-RAID) with a single I/O space. We report the new RAID-x design and its benchmark performance results. The advantage of RAID-x comes mainly from its orthogonal striping and mirroring (OSM) architecture. The bandwidth is enhanced with distributed striping across local and remote disks, while the reliability comes from orthogonal mirroring on local disks at the background. Our RAID-x design is experimentally compared with the RAID-5, RAID-10, and chained-declustering RAID through benchmarking on a research Linux cluster at USC. Andrew and Bonnie benchmark results are reported on all four disk-array architectures. Cooperative disk drivers and Linux extensions are developed to enable not only the single I/O space, bu...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: TPDS
• Authors: Kai Hwang, Hai Jin, Roy S. C. Ho
• Keywords: Disk-array Architectures, Local Disks, RAID-x Design, TPDS 2002