Disk Failure Prediction in Data Centers via Online Learning

Disk failure has become a major concern with the rapid expansion of storage systems in data centers. Based on SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) attributes, many researchers derive disk failure prediction models using machine learning techniques. Despite the significant developments, the majority of works rely on offline training and thereby hinder their adaption to the continuous update of forthcoming data, suffering from the 'model aging' problem. We are therefore motivated to uncover the root cause -- the dynamic SMART distribution for 'model aging', aiming to resolve the performance degradation as to pave a comprehensive study in practice. In this paper, we introduce a novel disk failure prediction model using Online Random Forests (ORFs). Our ORF-based model can automatically evolve with sequential arrival of data on-the-fly and thus is highly adaptive to the variance of SMART distribution over time. Moreover, it has favourable advantage against the offline counterparts in terms of superior prediction performance. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our ORF model converges rapidly to the offline random forests and achieves stable failure detection rates of 93-99% with low false alarm rates. Furthermore, we demonstrate the ability of our approach on maintaining stable prediction performance for the long-term usage in data centers.