A RANDOMLY EXPANDABLE METHOD FOR DATA LAYOUT OF RAID STORAGE SYSTEMS

摘要

With the increase in data volume, velocity, and variety, the need for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID) storage systems capacity is growing dramatically. However, the probability of disk failures in RAID storage systems is sharply higher with increased program/erase cycles, read cycles, and retention time. RAID storage systems are faced with more challenges in fault tolerance, storage efficiency, computational complexity, and expandability. This article presents a novel data layout scheme for RAID storage systems using random binary extensive code (RBEC), which is designed to ensure random expandability, high reliability, and availability of data in RAID storage systems. RBEC is a systematic code family in which the generator matrix consists of two submatrices with entries over GF(2), an identity matrix on the top, and another submatrix on the bottom. Compared with existing approaches, the attractive advantages of our scheme include the following: (1) it is completely implemented based on simple exclusive OR (XOR) operations and has systematic code properties, (2) it can provide arbitrary fault tolerance, (3) its storage efficiency is quasi-optimal, and (4) RAID storage system data and parity disks can be randomly expanded according to the requirements of the practical systems. Thus, our scheme is particularly suitable for RAID storage systems that need higher reliability, availability, and expandability.