Abstract: Traditional disk arrays have centralized control architecture. The number of connected disks is constrained by the system bus. Centralized RAID architecture easily generates performance bottleneck and can not tolerate more than two disks faults. This paper proposed MT2RAID,a modular tree-connected multi tier RAID architecture for large scale disk arrays. MT2RAID is built from a collection of commodity components. Storage units are connected through fat tree based interconnection channels. The performance and reliability of different MT2RAID level were also analyzed and discussed. Prototype experimental results show that MT2RAID also has performance advantages compared with centralized RAID architecture.

Key words: RAID,Scalability, Reliability, Modular