SRsim: A simulator for SSD-based RAID

Abstract

RAID is a popular storage architecture devised to improve both I/O performance and reliability of disk storages with disk arrays. With the declining price of NAND flash-based solid state drives and their performance gains, they have been widely deployed in systems ranging from portables to Internet-scale enterprise systems. By virtue of the benefits, studies on developing RAID gears with solid state drives have been performed in recent years. However, there are still some research issues on realizing a reliable RAID system with arrays of solid state drives due to the different characteristics of NAND flash memory. Moreover, the internal S/W architecture of the current commercial SSDs are not opened to the public so that it is hard to test SSD-based RAID systems with their devised algorithms. The fundamental algorithms in DBMS have been optimized for the use of hard disk drives, which prefer sequential data accesses. Recently, DBMS internals have been modified to make the best use of solid state drives rather than simple hardware replacement. To help the studies, we propose an open-source SSD-based RAID simulator named SRsim. SRSim helps researchers explore and experiment their ideas on an array os solid state drives more easily and accurately.