ORAID: An Intelligent and Fault-Tolerant Object Storage Device

Hints for traditional storage system come from three aspects: file or directory attribute layout, user input and file content analysis. But in the OBS (object-based storage), object, a new fundamental storage component different from traditional storage unit (file or block), provides ample hints for storage system, which are help for designing more intelligent (or smarter) storage device. RAID (redundant arrays of independent disks) is a popular mechanism to offer fault-tolerance storage. But RAID based on file or block interface has very limited intelligence. This paper presents a novel object-based device: ORAID (object RAID). ORAID consolidates disk space of individual disk into a single storage spool and implements object-sharing and fault-tolerance through the object-interface. In ORAID, storage object is stored in form of original block fragments and their XOR verification fragments are among the disks of the device. As the higher abstract of data encapsulation, storage object provides more intelligent properties, and ORAID has more effective ability to implement online data re-layout and online capacity expansion.