A scalable multi-host RAID-5 with parity consistency

Abstract

This paper proposes a multi-host RAID-5 architecture in which multiple hosts can access disk array via storage area network. In this configuration, parity inconsistency occurs when different hosts try to write to the same stripe simultaneously. Parity consistency can be ensured by the serialization of the writes to the same stripe with locking method. While conventional locking methods can be used, the performance is degraded in the case of large number of hosts. When multiple-reader single-writer file consistency semantic is used, most of the stripes are written exclusively by a single host, so parity inconsistency problem does not occur. By removing locking of those stripes which amounts to 95% in practical workloads, the performance becomes more scalable and 50% faster than using the conventional stripe locking methods.