Awarded Best Student Paper! -- Improving Storage System Availability with D-GRAID

Abstract

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of D-GRAID, a gracefully-degrading and quickly-recovering RAID storage array. D-GRAID ensures that most files within the file system remain available even when an unexpectedly high number of faults occur. D-GRAID also recovers from failures quickly, restoring only live file system data to a hot spare. Both graceful degradation and live-block recovery are implemented in a prototype SCSI-based storage system underneath unmodified file systems, demonstrating that powerful file-system like functionality can be implemented behind a narrow block-based interface.