Optimizing RAID Storage Performance

Caching and prefetch are important techniques for designing a storage system. As the speed gap between memory and disk is so large today, caching and prefetch are critical to enterprise-class storage applications, which demands high-performance. We studied the performance of a mid-range storage server and analyzed the existing caching mechanism in the server. We developed a fast caching methodology which reduces the cache access latency and processing overhead of the storage controller. In addition, we proposed a new adaptive prefetch scheme reduces the average disk access time seen by the host. Via trace-driven simulation, we evaluated the performance of our new caching and adaptive prefetch schemes. Our results showed the performance improvement for the TPC-C benchmark.