Visible to the public Toward I/O-efficient protection against silent data corruptions in RAID arrays

TitleToward I/O-efficient protection against silent data corruptions in RAID arrays
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2014
AuthorsMingqiang Li, Lee, P.P.C.
Conference NameMass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST), 2014 30th Symposium on
Date PublishedJune
KeywordsArrays, data integrity, Data models, disk drives, disk errors, I/O overhead, input-output programs, integrity checking model, integrity protection schemes, IO-efficient integrity checking mechanisms, IO-efficient protection, RAID, RAID arrays, read-write characteristics, Redundancy, security of data, silent data corruptions, storage workloads, Systematics, Taxonomy, trace-driven simulation, user write sizes
Abstract

Although RAID is a well-known technique to protect data against disk errors, it is vulnerable to silent data corruptions that cannot be detected by disk drives. Existing integrity protection schemes designed for RAID arrays often introduce high I/O overhead. Our key insight is that by properly designing an integrity protection scheme that adapts to the read/write characteristics of storage workloads, the I/O overhead can be significantly mitigated. In view of this, this paper presents a systematic study on I/O-efficient integrity protection against silent data corruptions in RAID arrays. We formalize an integrity checking model, and justify that a large proportion of disk reads can be checked with simpler and more I/O-efficient integrity checking mechanisms. Based on this integrity checking model, we construct two integrity protection schemes that provide complementary performance advantages for storage workloads with different user write sizes. We further propose a quantitative method for choosing between the two schemes in real-world scenarios. Our trace-driven simulation results show that with the appropriate integrity protection scheme, we can reduce the I/O overhead to below 15%.

DOI10.1109/MSST.2014.6855548
Citation Key6855548