Design and Performance Evaluation of Software RAID for Video-on-Demand Servers

주문형 비디오 서버를 위한 소프트웨어 RAID의 설계 및 성능 분석

Software RAID(Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) is defined as a storage system that provides capabilities of hardware RAID, and guarantees high reliability as well as high performance. In this paper, we propose an enhanced disk scheduling algorithm and a scheme to guarantee reliability of data. We also design and implement software RAID by utilizing these mechanism to develop a storage system for multimedia applications. Because the proposed algorithm improves a defect of traditional GSS algorithm that disk I/O requests arc served in a fixed order, it minimizes buffer consumption and reduces the number of deadline miss through service group exchange. Software RAID also alleviates data copy overhead during disk services by sharing kernel memory. Even though the implemented software RAID uses the parity approach to guarantee reliability of data, it adopts different data allocation scheme. Therefore, we reduce disk accesses in logical XOR operations to compute the new parity data on all write operations. In the performance evaluation experiments, we found that if we apply the proposed schemes to implement the Software RAID, it can be used as a storage system for small-sized video-on-demand servers.