X. Yu, B. Gum, Y. Chen, R. Y. Wang, K. Li, A. Krishnamurthy, and
T. E. Anderson.
Trading Capacity for Performance in a Disk Array.
Proc. Fourth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and
Implementation.
October 2000.
A variety of performance-enhancing techniques, such as striping,
mirroring, and rotational data replication, exist in the disk array
literature. Given a fixed budget of disks, one must intelligently
choose what combination of these techniques to employ. In this paper,
we present a way of designing disk arrays that can flexibly and
systematically reduce seek and rotational delay in a balanced manner.
We give analytical models that can guide an array designer towards
optimal configurations by considering both disk and workload
characteristics. We have implemented a prototype disk array that
incorporates the configuration models. In the process, we have also
developed a robust disk head position prediction mechanism without any
hardware support. The resulting prototype demonstrates the
effectiveness of the configuration models.