NFuSA - Neuro-Fuzzy Algorithm for Sparing in RAID Systems

Sparing, the process of rebuilding data in case of disk failure, has been a target of research since early 1990's. The problem that these specific hardware/software control systems typically face in sparing is the tradeoff between serving requests - user's versus internal. If the algorithm favors user requests, in the presence of heavy workloads, the internal data recovery gets preempted resulting in risky delay of the data sparing. On the other hand, favoring internal data recovery requests over the user requests can result in high response times per transaction that are unacceptable for the users of the RAID system.