WorkOut: I/O Workload Outsourcing for Boosting RAID Reconstruction Performance

User I/O intensity can significantly impact the performance of on-line RAID reconstruction due to contention for the shared disk bandwidth. Based on this observation, this paper proposes a novel scheme, called WorkOut (I/O Workload Outsourcing), to significantly boost RAID reconstruction performance. WorkOut effectively outsources all write requests and popular read requests originally targeted at the degraded RAID set to a surrogate RAID set during reconstruction. Our lightweight prototype implementation of WorkOut and extensive tracedriven and benchmark-driven experiments demonstrate that, compared with existing reconstruction approaches, WorkOut significantly speeds up both the total reconstruction time and the average user response time. Importantly, WorkOut is orthogonal to and can be easily incorporated into any existing reconstruction algorithms. Furthermore, it can be extended to improving the performance of other background support RAID tasks, such as re-synchronization and disk scrubbing.