Examining SSD-correlated Failures within Racks in Production Data Centers

With flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) becoming the primary storage medium in data centers, SSD failures are emerging as a significant factor affecting the reliability of data center storage systems. However, our understanding of the temporal and spatial distribution of field SSD failures remains limited, constraining the effectiveness of redundancy protection schemes in data center storage. To achieve high-quality rack-level fault tolerance, we conduct an in-depth analysis of correlated failures among 100K SSDs in Alibaba’s data center. The SSD-hosted applications exert a constant influence on the operation of the data center. We categorize intra-rack failures into heterogeneous application (hete-app) and homogeneous application (homo-app) failures based on the applications. We conduct a thorough investigation into the spatiotemporal trends of these two types of in-rack failures, exploring their causes and assessing the feasibility of rearranging racks to mitigate the occurrence of intra-rack failure chains. Furthermore, we employ a trace-driven simulator to verify the impact of different redundancy schemes on the reliability in clusters of hete-app racks and homo-app racks under high-failure-percentage environments.