Analytic Modeling and Comparisons of Striping Strategies for Replicated Disk Arrays

Abstract

Data replication has been widely used as a means of increasing the data availability for critical applications in the event of disk failure. There are different ways of organizing the two copies of the data across a disk array. This paper compares strategies for striping data of the two copies in the context of database applications. By keeping both copies active, we explore strategies that can take advantage of the additional copy to improve not only availability, but also performance during both normal and failure modes. We consider the effects of small and large stripe sizes on the performance of disk arrays with two active copies of data under a mixed workload of queries and transactions with a skewed access pattern. We propose a dual (hybrid) striping strategy which uses different stripe sizes for the two copies and a disk queuing policy designed to exploit this organization for optimal performance. An analytical model is devised for this scheme, by treating the individual disks as independent, and applying an M/G/l queuing model. Disks on which a large query scan is running are modeled by a variation of the queue with permanent customers, which leads to an iterative functional equation for the query scan delay distribution. A solution for this equation is given. The results are validated against simulations and are shown to match well. Comparison with uniform striping strategies show that the dual striping scheme yields the most stable performance in a variety of workloads, out-performing the uniform striping strategy using either mirrored or chained de-clustering under both normal and failure mode operations. © 1995 IEEE