@InProceedings{anderson:raid,
  author = {Eric Anderson and Ram Swaminathan and Alistair Veitch and Guillermo
  {A. Alvarez} and John Wilkes},
  title = {Selecting {RAID} Levels for Disk Arrays},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the USENIX FAST '02 Conference on File and
  Storage Technologies},
  year = {2002},
  month = {January},
  pages = {189--202},
  publisher = {USENIX Association},
  address = {Monterey, CA},
  URL =
  {http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/fast02/andersonRAID.html},
  keywords = {file systems, pario-bib},
  abstract = {Disk arrays have a myriad of configuration parameters that
  interact in counter-intuitive ways, and those interactions can have
  significant impacts on cost, performance, and reliability. Even after values
  for these parameters have been chosen, there are exponentially-many ways to
  map data onto the disk arrays' logical units. Meanwhile, the importance of
  correct choices is increasing: storage systems represent an growing fraction
  of total system cost, they need to respond more rapidly to changing needs,
  and there is less and less tolerance for mistakes. We believe that automatic
  design and configuration of storage systems is the only viable solution to
  these issues. To that end, we present a comparative study of a range of
  techniques for programmatically choosing the RAID levels to use in a disk
  array. Our simplest approaches are modeled on existing, manual rules of
  thumb: they "tag" data with a RAID level before determining the configuration
  of the array to which it is assigned. Our best approach simultaneously
  determines the RAID levels for the data, the array configuration, and the
  layout of data on that array. It operates as an optimization process with the
  twin goals of minimizing array cost while ensuring that storage workload
  performance requirements will be met. This approach produces robust solutions
  with an average cost/performance 14-17{PCT} better than the best results for
  the tagging schemes, and up to 150-200{PCT} better than their worst
  solutions. We believe that this is the first presentation and systematic
  analysis of a variety of novel, fully-automatic RAID-level selection
  techniques.}
}