RAID0.5: Active Data Replication for Low Cost Disk Array Data Protection

RAID has long been established as an effective way to provide highly reliable as well as high-performance disk subsystems. However, reliability in RAID systems comes at the cost of extra disks. In this paper, we describe a mechanism that we have termed RAID0.5 that enables striped disks with very high data reliability but low disk cost. We take advantage of the fact that most disk systems use backup systems for disaster recovery. With the use of these backup systems, the disk system needs to only replicate data since the last backup, thus drastically reducing the storage space requirement. Though RAID0.5 has the same data loss characteristics of traditional mirroring, the lower storage space comes at the cost of lower availability. Thus, RAID0.5 is a tradeoff between lower disk cost and lower availability while still preserving very high data reliability. We present analytical reliability models and experimental results that demonstrate the enhanced reliability and performance of the proposed RAID0.5 system.