RAID-VCR:A New RAID Architecture for Tolerating Triple Disk Failures
Dong Huan · Chinese Journal of Computers · 2006
Although almost all vendors enhance the availability of their storage systems by levering RAID technology to achieve redundant storage, there is currently no feasible RAID architecture being able to tolerate simultaneous failures of three member disks. To improve the fault-tolerant capability of RAID structure, this paper introduces a novel RAID structure named RAID-VCR which taking advantage of CR coding techniques used in telecommunication while making some modification to adapt to the characteristics of storage systems. The encoding and decoding procedure of RAID-VCR are based on XOR operations, and the computing complexity is quadratic in the number of data disks. This makes it quite simple and feasible. According to mathematical proof and experiments, RAID-VCR could improve the fault-tolerant capability remarkably and tolerate triple simultaneous disk failures in any pattern with only three extra disks for parity information, while makes few negative influences on system's throughput and disk capacity utilization.