Performance modeling and evaluation of a two-dimensional disk array system

This paper presents a performance model of a two-dimensional disk array (TIDA) system, which is composed of several major subsystems including disk cache, intelligent disk array controller, SCSI-like I/O bus, and two-dimensional array of disk devices. Accessing conflict in these subsystems and fork/join synchronization of physical disk requests are considered in the model. The representation for the complex behavior, including the interactions among subsystems, of a whole disk array system distinguishes the model from others that model only individual subsystems. To assist evaluating the architectural alternatives of TIDA, we employ a subsystem access time modeling methodology, in which we model for each subsystem the mean subsystem access time per request (SATPR). Fed with a given set of representative workload parameters, the performance model is used to conduct performance evaluation and the SATPRs of the subsystems are utilized to identify the bottleneck subsystem for performance improvement. The results show that (1) the values of some key design parameters, such as data block size and I/O bus bandwidth that yield the best system throughput are dependent not only on the subsystem performance but also on the interaction among subsystems; (2) an I/O bus bandwidth of 5 Mbytes/s per disk device is large enough for data transfers from/to disk devices equipped with a cache of 1 Mbytes; and (3) the activity of fork/join synchronization of physical disk requests may cause performance degradation, which can be improved by using large I/O bus bandwidth and/or placing a cache in each disk device. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.