H-Scale: A Fast Approach to Scale Disk Arrays via Hybrid Stripe Deployment

To satisfy the explosive growth of data in large-scale data centers, where redundant arrays of independent disks (RAIDs), especially RAID-5, are widely deployed, effective storage scaling and disk expansion methods are desired. However, a way to reduce the data migration overhead and maintain the reliability of the original RAID are major concerns of storage scaling. To address these problems, we propose a new RAID scaling scheme, H-Scale, to achieve fast RAID scaling via hybrid stripe layouts. H-Scale takes advantage of the loose restriction of stripe structures to choose migrated data and to create hybrid stripe structures. The main advantages of our scheme include: (1) dramatically reducing the data migration overhead and thus speeding up the scaling process, (2) maintaining the original RAID’s reliability, (3) balancing the workload among disks after scaling, and (4) providing a general scaling approach for different RAID levels. Our theoretical analysis show that H-Scale outperforms existing scaling solutions in terms of data migration, I/O overheads, and parity update operations. Evaluation results on a prototype implementation demonstrate that H-Scale speeds up the online scaling process by up to 60% under SPC traces, and similar improvements on scaling time and user response time are also achieved by evaluations using standard benchmarks.