Disk Array Models in Minerva

Enterprise storage systems typically depend on disk arrays to satisfy their capacity and availability needs. To design and maintain storage systems that efficiently satisfy evolving requirements, it is critical to be able to evaluate configuration alternatives without having to physically implement them. Because of the large number of candidate configurations that need to be evaluated in real-life situations, simulation models are excessively slow for that task. In this paper, we describe analytical throughput models for RAID 1/0 and RAID 5 storage in the Hewlett-Packard FC-30 disk array. We validate our models against the real array, and report the relative errors in the models’ predictions. Our models have a mean error of 5.4% and a maximum error of 19%, for the set of validations workloads we used.