SSD Failures in Large-Scale Data Centers: What? Why? and How?

With SSDs gradually replacing HDDs as the main-stream storage media in modern large-scale data centers, SSD failure analysis has become increasingly important. We conducted an in-depth data-driven analysis of the failure characteristics of an SSD-based data center in Alibaba based on the failure datasets in 2018 and 2019 and SMART logs on December 31, 2019. Our objectives focus on 3 “W”s, illustrated as follows. What factors influence the occurrence of failures? Why do these factors influence the occurrence of failures? How can companies reduce the occurrence of SSD failures? We expect that our findings and analysis can benefit future SSD-based storage system designs.