Chapter 10: Mass-Storage Systems

Chapter 10: Mass-Storage Systems

 Overview of Mass Storage Structure
 Disk Structure
 Disk Attachment
 Disk Scheduling
 Disk Management
 Swap-Space Management
 RAID Structure
 Stable-Storage Implementation
 Objectives
To describe the physical structure of secondary storage devices and its effects
on the uses of the devices
To explain the performance characteristics of mass-storage devices
To evaluate disk scheduling algorithms
To discuss operating-system services provided for mass storage, including
RAID
 Overview of Mass Storage Structure
 Magnetic disks provide bulk of secondary storage of modern computers
 Drives rotate at 60 to 250 times per second
 Transfer rate is rate at which data flow between drive and computer
 Positioning time (random-access time) is time to move disk arm to desired
cylinder (seek time) and time for desired sector to rotate under the disk head
(rotational latency)
 Head crash results from disk head making contact with the disk surface --
That’s bad
 Disks can be removable
 Drive attached to computer via I/O bus
 Busses vary, including EIDE, ATA, SATA, USB, Fibre Channel, SCSI, SAS,
Firewire
 Host controller in computer uses bus to talk to disk controller built into drive
or storage array
Moving-head Disk Mechanism
 Hard Disks
 Platters range from .85” to 14” (historically)
 Commonly 3.5”, 2.5”, and 1.8”
 Range from 30GB to 3TB per drive
 Performance
 Transfer Rate – theoretical – 6 Gb/sec
(From Wikipedia)
 Effective Transfer Rate – real – 1Gb/sec
 Seek time from 3ms to 12ms – 9ms common for desktop drives
 Average seek time measured or calculated based on 1/3 of tracks
 Latency based on spindle speed
1 / (RPM / 60) = 60 / RPM
 Average latency = ½ latency
 Hard Disk Performance
 Access Latency = Average access time = average seek time + average latency
 For fastest disk 3ms + 2ms = 5ms
 For slow disk 9ms + 5.56ms = 14.56ms
 Average I/O time = average access time + (amount to transfer / transfer rate) +
controller overhead
 For example to transfer a 4KB block on a 7200 RPM disk with a 5ms average
seek time, 1Gb/sec transfer rate with a .1ms controller overhead =
 5ms + 4.17ms + 0.1ms + transfer time =
 Transfer time = 4KB / 1Gb/s * 8Gb / GB * 1GB / 10242KB = 32 / (10242) =
0.031 ms
 Average I/O time for 4KB block = 9.27ms + .031ms = 9.301ms
The First Commercial Disk Drive

1956
IBM RAMDAC computer
included the IBM Model 350
disk storage system

5M (7 bit) characters
50 x 24” platters
Access time = < 1 second
 Solid-State Disks
 Nonvolatile memory used like a hard drive
 Many technology variations
 Can be more reliable than HDDs
 More expensive per MB
 Maybe have shorter life span
 Less capacity
 But much faster
 Busses can be too slow -> connect directly to PCI for example
 No moving parts, so no seek time or rotational latency
 Magnetic Tape
 Was early secondary-storage medium
 Evolved from open spools to cartridges
 Relatively permanent and holds large quantities of data
 Access time slow
 Random access ~1000 times slower than disk
 Mainly used for backup, storage of infrequently-used data, transfer medium
between systems
 Kept in spool and wound or rewound past read-write head
 Once data under head, transfer rates comparable to disk
 140MB/sec and greater
 200GB to 1.5TB typical storage
 Common technologies are LTO-{3,4,5} and T10000
 Disk Structure
 Disk drives are addressed as large 1-dimensional arrays of logical blocks,
where the logical block is the smallest unit of transfer
 Low-level formatting creates logical blocks on physical media
 The 1-dimensional array of logical blocks is mapped into the sectors of the disk
sequentially
 Sector 0 is the first sector of the first track on the outermost cylinder
 Mapping proceeds in order through that track, then the rest of the tracks in
that cylinder, and then through the rest of the cylinders from outermost to
innermost
 Logical to physical address should be easy
Except for bad sectors
Non-constant # of sectors per track via constant angular velocity
 Disk Attachment
 Host-attached storage accessed through I/O ports talking to I/O busses
 SCSI itself is a bus, up to 16 devices on one cable, SCSI initiator requests
operation and SCSI targets perform tasks
 Each target can have up to 8 logical units (disks attached to device controller)
 FC is high-speed serial architecture
 Can be switched fabric with 24-bit address space – the basis of storage area
networks (SANs) in which many hosts attach to many storage units
 I/O directed to bus ID, device ID, logical unit (LUN)
 Storage Array
 Can just attach disks, or arrays of disks
 Storage Array has controller(s), provides features to attached
host(s)
 Ports to connect hosts to array
 Memory, controlling software (sometimes NVRAM, etc)
 A few to thousands of disks
 RAID, hot spares, hot swap (discussed later)
 Shared storage -> more efficiency
 Features found in some file systems
 Snaphots, clones, thin provisioning, replication,
deduplication, etc
 Storage Area Network
 Common in large storage environments
 Multiple hosts attached to multiple storage arrays - flexible
 Storage Area Network (Cont.)
 SAN is one or more storage arrays
 Connected to one or more Fibre Channel switches
 Hosts also attach to the switches
 Storage made available via LUN Masking from specific arrays to specific
servers
 Easy to add or remove storage, add new host and allocate it storage
 Over low-latency Fibre Channel fabric
 Why have separate storage networks and communications networks?
 Consider iSCSI, FCOE
 Network-Attached Storage
 Network-attached storage (NAS) is storage made available over a network rather
than over a local connection (such as a bus)
 Remotely attaching to file systems
 NFS and CIFS are common protocols
 Implemented via remote procedure calls (RPCs) between host and storage over
typically TCP or UDP on IP network
 iSCSI protocol uses IP network to carry the SCSI protocol
 Remotely attaching to devices (blocks)
 Disk Scheduling
 The operating system is responsible for using hardware efficiently — for the disk
drives, this means having a fast access time and disk bandwidth
 Minimize seek time
 Seek time  seek distance
 Disk bandwidth is the total number of bytes transferred, divided by the total time
between the first request for service and the completion of the last transfer
 Disk Scheduling (Cont.)
 There are many sources of disk I/O request
 OS
 System processes
 Users processes
 I/O request includes input or output mode, disk address, memory address,
number of sectors to transfer
 OS maintains queue of requests, per disk or device
 Idle disk can immediately work on I/O request, busy disk means work must
queue
 Optimization algorithms only make sense when a queue exists
 Disk Scheduling (Cont.)
 Note that drive controllers have small buffers and can manage a queue of I/O
requests (of varying “depth”)
 Several algorithms exist to schedule the servicing of disk I/O requests
 The analysis is true for one or many platters
 We illustrate scheduling algorithms with a request queue (0-199)

98, 183, 37, 122, 14, 124, 65, 67

Head pointer 53
 FCFS
Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders
 SSTF
 Shortest Seek Time First selects the request with the minimum seek time from
the current head position
 SSTF scheduling is a form of SJF scheduling; may cause starvation of some
requests
 Illustration shows total head movement of 236 cylinders
 SCAN
 The disk arm starts at one end of the disk, and moves toward the other end,
servicing requests until it gets to the other end of the disk, where the head
movement is reversed and servicing continues.
 SCAN algorithm Sometimes called the elevator algorithm
 Illustration shows total head movement of 208 cylinders
 But note that if requests are uniformly dense, largest density at other end of disk
and those wait the longest
SCAN (Cont.)
 C-SCAN
 Provides a more uniform wait time than SCAN
 The head moves from one end of the disk to the other, servicing requests as it
goes
 When it reaches the other end, however, it immediately returns to the
beginning of the disk, without servicing any requests on the return trip
 Treats the cylinders as a circular list that wraps around from the last cylinder to
the first one
 Total number of cylinders?
C-SCAN (Cont.)
 C-LOOK
 LOOK a version of SCAN, C-LOOK a version of C-SCAN
 Arm only goes as far as the last request in each direction, then reverses
direction immediately, without first going all the way to the end of the disk
 Total number of cylinders?
C-LOOK (Cont.)
 Selecting a Disk-Scheduling Algorithm
 SSTF is common and has a natural appeal
 SCAN and C-SCAN perform better for systems that place a heavy load on the
disk
 Less starvation
 Performance depends on the number and types of requests
 Requests for disk service can be influenced by the file-allocation method
 And metadata layout
 The disk-scheduling algorithm should be written as a separate module of the
operating system, allowing it to be replaced with a different algorithm if necessary
 Either SSTF or LOOK is a reasonable choice for the default algorithm
 What about rotational latency?
 Difficult for OS to calculate
 How does disk-based queueing effect OS queue ordering efforts?
 Disk Management
 Low-level formatting, or physical formatting — Dividing a disk into sectors that
the disk controller can read and write
 Each sector can hold header information, plus data, plus error correction code
(ECC)
 Usually 512 bytes of data but can be selectable
 To use a disk to hold files, the operating system still needs to record its own data
structures on the disk
 Partition the disk into one or more groups of cylinders, each treated as a logical
disk
 Logical formatting or “making a file system”
 To increase efficiency most file systems group blocks into clusters
Disk I/O done in blocks
File I/O done in clusters
 Disk Management (Cont.)

 Raw disk access for apps that want to do their own block management, keep OS
out of the way (databases for example)
 Boot block initializes system
 The bootstrap is stored in ROM
 Bootstrap loader program stored in boot blocks of boot partition
 Methods such as sector sparing used to handle bad blocks
Booting from a Disk in Windows
 Swap-Space Management
 Swap-space — Virtual memory uses disk space as an extension of main memory
 Less common now due to memory capacity increases
 Swap-space can be carved out of the normal file system, or, more commonly, it
can be in a separate disk partition (raw)
 Swap-space management
 4.3BSD allocates swap space when process starts; holds text segment (the
program) and data segment
 Kernel uses swap maps to track swap-space use
 Solaris 2 allocates swap space only when a dirty page is forced out of physical
memory, not when the virtual memory page is first created
File data written to swap space until write to file system requested
Other dirty pages go to swap space due to no other home
Text segment pages thrown out and reread from the file system as needed
 What if a system runs out of swap space?
 Some systems allow multiple swap spaces
Data Structures for Swapping on Linux Systems
 RAID Structure
 RAID – redundant array of inexpensive disks
 multiple disk drives provides reliability via redundancy
 Increases the mean time to failure
 Mean time to repair – exposure time when another failure could cause data loss
 Mean time to data loss based on above factors
 If mirrored disks fail independently, consider disk with 1300,000 mean time to
failure and 10 hour mean time to repair
 Mean time to data loss is 100, 0002 / (2 ∗ 10) = 500 ∗ 106 hours, or 57,000
years!
 Frequently combined with NVRAM to improve write performance
 Several improvements in disk-use techniques involve the use of multiple disks
working cooperatively
 RAID (Cont.)
 Disk striping uses a group of disks as one storage unit
 RAID is arranged into six different levels
 RAID schemes improve performance and improve the reliability of the storage
system by storing redundant data
 Mirroring or shadowing (RAID 1) keeps duplicate of each disk
 Striped mirrors (RAID 1+0) or mirrored stripes (RAID 0+1) provides high
performance and high reliability
 Block interleaved parity (RAID 4, 5, 6) uses much less redundancy
 RAID within a storage array can still fail if the array fails, so automatic
replication of the data between arrays is common
 Frequently, a small number of hot-spare disks are left unallocated, automatically
replacing a failed disk and having data rebuilt onto them
RAID Levels
RAID (0 + 1) and (1 + 0)
 Other Features
 Regardless of where RAID implemented, other useful features can be added
 Snapshot is a view of file system before a set of changes take place (i.e. at a
point in time)
 More in Ch 12
 Replication is automatic duplication of writes between separate sites
 For redundancy and disaster recovery
 Can be synchronous or asynchronous
 Hot spare disk is unused, automatically used by RAID production if a disk fails
to replace the failed disk and rebuild the RAID set if possible
 Decreases mean time to repair
 Extensions
 RAID alone does not prevent or detect data corruption or other errors, just disk
failures
 Solaris ZFS adds checksums of all data and metadata
 Checksums kept with pointer to object, to detect if object is the right one and
whether it changed
 Can detect and correct data and metadata corruption
 ZFS also removes volumes, partitions
 Disks allocated in pools
 Filesystems with a pool share that pool, use and release space like
malloc() and free() memory allocate / release calls
ZFS Checksums All Metadata and Data
Traditional and Pooled Storage
 Stable-Storage Implementation
 Write-ahead log scheme requires stable storage
 Stable storage means data is never lost (due to failure, etc.)
 To implement stable storage:
 Replicate information on more than one nonvolatile storage media with
independent failure modes
 Update information in a controlled manner to ensure that we can recover the
stable data after any failure during data transfer or recovery
 Disk write has 1 of 3 outcomes
1. Successful completion - The data were written correctly on disk
2. Partial failure - A failure occurred in the midst of transfer, so only some of the
sectors were written with the new data, and the sector being written during the
failure may have been corrupted
3. Total failure - The failure occurred before the disk write started, so the
previous data values on the disk remain intact
 Stable-Storage Implementation (Cont.)
 If failure occurs during block write, recovery procedure restores block to consistent state
 System maintains 2 physical blocks per logical block and does the following:
1. Write to 1st physical
2. When successful, write to 2nd physical
3. Declare complete only after second write completes successfully
Systems frequently use NVRAM as one physical to accelerate
End of Chapter 10