Partial or complete disk failures are becoming so common and frequent in modern-day large-scale data centers that they are now considered the norm rather than the exception. It is thus of paramount importance to develop novel approaches to effectively and significantly supplementing and improving the existing RAID protection mechanisms, with the goal of providing high reliability and availability for RAID-structured storage systems so that they are capable of tolerating partial, complete, and multiple disk faults while delivering acceptable, non-stop services to the users. This project seeks to develop a holistic framework, called a RAID protection activator (ProActive), to address the fundamental and ever-increasing availability challenge facing RAID-structured storage systems. ProActive exploits application workload intensity and data/parity management and intelligently leverages rich available spare storage resources in large-scale data centers to address the efficiency problem of the existing state-of-the-art availability mechanisms for RAID. ProActive will develop solutions to handle the increasingly more frequent partial and complete disk failures in RAID-structured storage systems based on the design goals of significantly supplementing and improving existing fault-detection, fault-tolerance, and fault-recovery mechanisms. The broader impact of the project lies in its (1) research development that impacts and enriches fields as diverse as high-performance computing, availability and reliability in high-end computing systems; (2) infrastructure development that enhances research and education at UNL and, through accessibility via public domain, the high performance and data-intensive computing community; and (3) educational development that exposes graduate and undergraduate students to cutting edge research in highly available storage systems.
