A reliability model of energy-efficient parallel disk systems with data mirroring

In the last decade, parallel disk systems have increasingly become popular for data-intensive applications running on high-performance computing platforms. Conservation of energy in parallel disk systems has a strong impact on the cost of cooling equipment and backup powergeneration. This is because a significant amount of energy is consumed by parallel disks in highperformance computing centers. Although a wide range of energy conservation techniques have been developed for disk systems, research on reliability analysis for energy-efficient parallel disk systems is still in its infancy. In this paper, we make use of a Markov process to develop a quantitative reliability model for energy-efficient parallel disk systems using data mirroring. With the new model in place, a reliability analysis tool is developed to efficiently evaluate reliability of fault-tolerant parallel disk systems with two power modes. More importantly, the reliability model makes it possible to provide a good compromise between energy efficiency and reliability in energy-efficient and fault-tolerant parallel disk systems.