Emerging video surveillance, environmental monitoring applications, and constantly evolving large scientific setups require large, high-performance, and reliable storage systems with guaranteed real-time data access. These systems are often implemented using redundant arrays of independent disks (RAID). In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of preemptive disk-scheduling algorithms to a...

A novel solid state drive (SSD) controller integrated circuit structure is presented. This controller has up to five flash memory channels. These five channels, regarded as four independent virtual disks in a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) system, can be configured as RAID0 or RAID5 mode. This real silicon controller was silicon proven working well in a single SSD unit with intrins...

To meet the bandwidth needs of modern computer systems, parallel storage systems are evolving beyond RAID levels 1 through 5. The Parallel Data Lab at Carnegie Mellon University has constructed three Scotch parallel storage testbeds to explore and evaluate five directions in RAID evolution: first, the development of new RAID architectures to reduce the cost/performance penalty of maintaining re...

The Vinum Volume Manager is a block device driver which implements virtual disk drives. It isolates disk hardware from the block device interface and maps data in ways which result in an increase in flexibility, performance and reliability compared to the traditional slice view of disk storage. Vinum implements the RAID-0, RAID-1 and RAID-5 models, both individually and in combination.

In order to overcome the small write problem in RAID5, especially software RAID5, we have designed and implemented a software RAID with a large virtual NVRAM cache under the Linux kernel. Because no additional hardware is needed to implement our write cache, we named it Virtual NVRAM Cache or VC-RAID for short. The main idea is to use a combination of a small portion of the system RAM and a log...

The dual effects of larger die sizes and technology scaling, combined with aggressive voltage scaling for power reduction, increase the error rates for on-chip memories. Traditional on-chip memory reliability techniques (e.g., ECC) incur significant power and performance overheads. In this paper, we propose a low-power-and-performance-overhead Embedded RAID (E-RAID) strategy and present Embedde...

-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 o...

Distributed systems in use today depend heavily on network communications between clients and servers. In this report, we describe the design and implementation of the network architecture (hardware, software and protocols) of the RAID-II system. RAID-II is a high speed file server connected to an UltraNetwork. To support high bandwidth network transfers with the RAID-II server, we divided the ...