IDO: Intelligent Data Outsourcing with Improved RAID Reconstruction Performance in Large-Scale Data Centers

Dealing with disk failures has become an increasingly common task for system administrators in the face of high disk failure rates in large-scale data centers consisting of hundreds of thousands of disks. Thus, achieving fast recovery from disk failures in general and high online RAID-reconstruction performance in particular has become crucial. To address the problem, this paper proposes IDO (Intelligent Data Outsourcing ), a proactive and zone-based optimization, to significantly improve on-line RAID-reconstruction performance. IDO moves popular data zones that are proactively identified in the normal state to a surrogate set at the onset of reconstruction. Thus, IDO enables most, if not all, user I/O requests to be serviced by the surrogate set instead of the degraded set during reconstruction.

Extensive trace-driven experiments on our lightweight prototype implementation of IDO demonstrate that, compared with the existing state-of-the-art reconstruction approaches WorkOut and VDF, IDO simultaneously speeds up the reconstruction time and the average user response time. Moreover, IDO can be extended to improving the performance of other background RAID support tasks, such as re-synchronization, RAID reshape and disk scrubbing.