Zoned-RAID for multimedia database servers

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel fault-tolerant disk subsystem named Zoned-RAID (Z-RAID). Z-RAID improves the performance of traditional RAID system by utilizing the zoning property of modern disks which provides multiple zones with different data transfer rates in a disk. This study proposes to optimize data transfer rate of RAID system by constraining placement of data blocks in multi-zone disks. We apply Z-RAID for multimedia database servers such as video servers that require a high data transfer rate as well as fault tolerance. Our analytical and experimental results demonstrate the superiority of ZRAID to conventional RAID. Z-RAID provides a higher effective data transfer rate in normal mode with no disadvantage. In the presence of a disk failure, Z-RAID still performs as well as RAID. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.