Performance analysis of a dual striping strategy for replicated disk arrays

Abstract

Data replicationhas been widely used as a means of increasing the data availabilityfor critical applicationsin the event of disk failure. This paper compares stmtegiesfor organizing the two copies of data in the context of database applications. 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 striping strategy which uses different stripe sires for the two copies. An analyticalperformance model is devised for this scheme, and the results are shown to match well with simulation data. Comparison with uniform striping stmtegies shows that the dual striping scheme yields the most stable performance in a variety of workloads, outperforming the uniform striping stmtegy using either mirrored or chaineddeclusteringunder both normal andfailure mode operations.