14,379 research outputs found
Self-Repairing Disk Arrays
As the prices of magnetic storage continue to decrease, the cost of replacing
failed disks becomes increasingly dominated by the cost of the service call
itself. We propose to eliminate these calls by building disk arrays that
contain enough spare disks to operate without any human intervention during
their whole lifetime. To evaluate the feasibility of this approach, we have
simulated the behavior of two-dimensional disk arrays with n parity disks and
n(n-1)/2 data disks under realistic failure and repair assumptions. Our
conclusion is that having n(n+1)/2 spare disks is more than enough to achieve a
99.999 percent probability of not losing data over four years. We observe that
the same objectives cannot be reached with RAID level 6 organizations and would
require RAID stripes that could tolerate triple disk failures.Comment: Part of ADAPT Workshop proceedings, 2015 (arXiv:1412.2347
EVENODD: An Efficient Scheme for Tolerating Double Disk Failures in RAID Architectures
We present a novel method, that we call EVENODD, for tolerating up to two disk failures in RAID architectures. EVENODD employs the addition of only two redundant disks and consists of simple exclusive-OR computations. This redundant storage is optimal, in the sense that two failed disks cannot be retrieved with less than two redundant disks. A major advantage of EVENODD is that it only requires parity hardware, which is typically present in standard RAID-5 controllers. Hence, EVENODD can be implemented on standard RAID-5 controllers without any hardware changes. The most commonly used scheme that employes optimal redundant storage (i.e., two extra disks) is based on Reed-Solomon (RS) error-correcting codes. This scheme requires computation over finite fields and results in a more complex implementation. For example, we show that the complexity of implementing EVENODD in a disk array with 15 disks is about 50% of the one required when using the RS scheme. The new scheme is not limited to RAID architectures: it can be used in any system requiring large symbols and relatively short codes, for instance, in multitrack magnetic recording. To this end, we also present a decoding algorithm for one column (track) in error
Robo-line storage: Low latency, high capacity storage systems over geographically distributed networks
Rapid advances in high performance computing are making possible more complete and accurate computer-based modeling of complex physical phenomena, such as weather front interactions, dynamics of chemical reactions, numerical aerodynamic analysis of airframes, and ocean-land-atmosphere interactions. Many of these 'grand challenge' applications are as demanding of the underlying storage system, in terms of their capacity and bandwidth requirements, as they are on the computational power of the processor. A global view of the Earth's ocean chlorophyll and land vegetation requires over 2 terabytes of raw satellite image data. In this paper, we describe our planned research program in high capacity, high bandwidth storage systems. The project has four overall goals. First, we will examine new methods for high capacity storage systems, made possible by low cost, small form factor magnetic and optical tape systems. Second, access to the storage system will be low latency and high bandwidth. To achieve this, we must interleave data transfer at all levels of the storage system, including devices, controllers, servers, and communications links. Latency will be reduced by extensive caching throughout the storage hierarchy. Third, we will provide effective management of a storage hierarchy, extending the techniques already developed for the Log Structured File System. Finally, we will construct a protototype high capacity file server, suitable for use on the National Research and Education Network (NREN). Such research must be a Cornerstone of any coherent program in high performance computing and communications
Alpha Entanglement Codes: Practical Erasure Codes to Archive Data in Unreliable Environments
Data centres that use consumer-grade disks drives and distributed
peer-to-peer systems are unreliable environments to archive data without enough
redundancy. Most redundancy schemes are not completely effective for providing
high availability, durability and integrity in the long-term. We propose alpha
entanglement codes, a mechanism that creates a virtual layer of highly
interconnected storage devices to propagate redundant information across a
large scale storage system. Our motivation is to design flexible and practical
erasure codes with high fault-tolerance to improve data durability and
availability even in catastrophic scenarios. By flexible and practical, we mean
code settings that can be adapted to future requirements and practical
implementations with reasonable trade-offs between security, resource usage and
performance. The codes have three parameters. Alpha increases storage overhead
linearly but increases the possible paths to recover data exponentially. Two
other parameters increase fault-tolerance even further without the need of
additional storage. As a result, an entangled storage system can provide high
availability, durability and offer additional integrity: it is more difficult
to modify data undetectably. We evaluate how several redundancy schemes perform
in unreliable environments and show that alpha entanglement codes are flexible
and practical codes. Remarkably, they excel at code locality, hence, they
reduce repair costs and become less dependent on storage locations with poor
availability. Our solution outperforms Reed-Solomon codes in many disaster
recovery scenarios.Comment: The publication has 12 pages and 13 figures. This work was partially
supported by Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF Doc.Mobility 162014, 2018
48th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and
Networks (DSN
Orbital assembly and maintenance study
The requirements, conceptual design, tradeoffs, procedures, and techniques for orbital assembly of the support structure of the microwave power transmission system and the radio astronomy telescope are described. Thermal and stress analyses, packaging, alignment, and subsystems requirements are included along with manned vs. automated and transportation tradeoffs. Technical and operational concepts for the manned and automated maintenance of satellites were investigated and further developed results are presented
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