SOAR: Storage Based System Reliability Analyzer

Abstract

Providing high level of the fault tolerance in a small system would be hard because of cost and efficiency concern. We developed a Storage Reliability Analyzer (SOAR) to test and to evaluate a fault tolerance of a single-disk system. SOAR is a standalone device which consist of a portable case, a folding LCD monitor, fault injection software, and SATA multiplexer card. The fault injection software was implemented in Linux. The OS of target is irrelevant because SOAR injects faults directly to the HDD of target. It can inject fault in real time through the SATA multiplexer card while the target is in operation. The tolerance of the target system could be evaluated with variety of errors of logical (device driver) and physical (ECC area of disk) faults. For easy evaluation and testing, there provided three test frame works, multimedia player, benchmark, and file system. This paper presents three groups of case studies: multimedia applications (AVIfile, MTV, Mplayer, RealPlayer, and Freeamp), CE device (Tvix Player), file system benchmark tools (LMbench, and IOzone), and file systems (Ext3, Ext4, JFS, and F2FS).