Performance of Redundant Disk Array Organizations in Transaction Processing Environments
Abstract
Disk arrays provide high data transfer rates by striping data over multiple disks. They also balance the load among disks in the same array. Redundant arrays use parity information to allow recovery from media failures in systems requiring high availability. In transaction processing environments, the high transfer rates of disk arrays are not fully exploited because I/O requests are typically small. However, redundant arrays are especially useful in such environments because they achieve media recovery at a significantly lower storage cost than mirrored disks. The performance of two redundant array organizations, data striping with rotated parity (RAID5) and parity striping, is analyzed and compared to that of mirrored disk systems and systems using no striping and no redundancy. Trace data from large scale commercial transaction processing systems are used to evaluate the performance of the organizations. Data and parity caching mechanisms for reducing the write penalty in arrays using parity are investigated and their effect on performance is analyzed.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 16, 1993
- Accession Number
- ADA274318
Entities
People
- Antoine N. Mourad
- Daniel G. Saab
- W. F. Fuchs
Organizations
- University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign