Improving reliability of energy-efficient parallel storage systems by disk swapping

The Popular Disk Concentration (PDC) technique and the Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID) technique are two effective energy saving schemes for parallel disk systems. The goal of PDC and MAID is to skew I/O load towards a few disks so that other disks can be transitioned to low power states to conserve energy. I/O load skewing techniques like PDC and MAID inherently affect reliability of parallel disks because disks storing popular data tend to have high failure rates than disks storing cold data. To achieve good tradeoffs between energy efficiency and disk reliability, we first present a reliability model to quantitatively study the reliability of energy-efficient parallel disk systems equipped with the PDC and MAID schemes. Then, we propose a novel strategy—disk swapping—to improve disk reliability by alternating disks storing hot data with disks holding cold data. We demonstrate that our disk-swapping strategies not only can increase the lifetime of cache disks in MAID-based parallel disk systems, but also can improve reliability of PDC-based parallel disk systems.