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USENIX 2001 Abstract
Extending Heterogeneity to RAID level 5
T. Cortes and J. Labarta, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Abstract
RAIDs level 5 are one of the most widely used kind of disk array, but
their usage has some limitations because all the disks in the array have
to be equal. Nowadays, assuming a homogeneous set of disks to build an
array is becoming a not very realistic assumption in many environments,
especially in low-cost clusters of workstations. It is difficult to
find a disk with the same characteristics as the ones in the array and
replacing or adding new disks breaks the homogeneity. In this paper, we
propose a block-distribution algorithm that can be used to build disk
arrays from a heterogeneous set of disks. We also show that arrays
using this algorithm are able to serve many more disk requests per
second than when blocks are distributed assuming that all disks have
the lowest common speed, which is the solution currently being used.
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