SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Abstract
A dominant architecture for storage arrays has been some variant of an HA-pair where a set of drives is connected to two separate data paths (aka controllers). Generally these systems have been designed to continue to provide service after any single hardware failure, yet experience shows that single faults have caused disruption in data service...and not for the reasons you might think! This talk describes analysis performed on a set of storage service disruptions over a period of two years, points out some common patterns, shares some thoughts about possible improvements, and most of all asks for help in contemplating what improvements will lead to even better reliability in storage service.
Learning Objectives
Understand how systems designed to be fault tolerant aren't always,Think about how storage system design can be improved