WLFC: Write Less in Flash-based Cache

Flash-based disk caches, for example Bcache and Flashcache, has gained tremendous popularity in industry in the last decade because of its low energy consumption, non-volatile nature and high I/O speed. But these cache systems have a worse write performance than the read performance because of the asymmetric I/O costs and the the internal GC mechanism. In addition to the performance issues, since the NAND flash is a type of EEPROM device, the lifespan is also limited by the Program/Erase (P/E) cycles. So how to improve the performance and the lifespan of flash-based caches in write-intensive scenarios has always been a hot issue. Benefiting from Open-Channel SSDs (OCSSDs), we propose a write-friendly flash-based disk cache system, which is called WLFC (Write Less in the Flash-based Cache). In WLFC, a strictly sequential writing method is used to minimize the write amplification. A new replacement algorithm for the write buffer is designed to minimize the erase count caused by the evicting. And a new data layout strategy is designed to minimize the metadata size persisted in SSDs. As a result, the Over-Provisioned (OP) space is completely removed, the erase count of the flash is greatly reduced, and the metadata size is 1/10 or less than that in BCache. Even with a small amount of metadata, the data consistency after the crash is still guaranteed. Compared with the existing mechanism, WLFC brings a 7%-80% reduction in write latency, a 1.07*-4.5* increment in write throughput, and a 50%-88.9% reduction in erase count, with a moderate overhead in read performance

RAIDX: RAID EXTENDED FOR HETEROGENEOUS ARRAYS

The computer hard drive market has diversified with the establishment of solid state disks (SSDs) as an alternative to magnetic hard disks (HDDs). Each hard drive technology has its advantages: the SSDs are faster than HDDs but the HDDs are cheaper. Our goal is to construct a parallel storage system with HDDs and SSDs such that the parallel system is as fast as the SSDs. Achieving this goal is challenging since the slow HDDs store more data and become bottlenecks, while the SSDs remain idle. RAIDX is a parallel storage system designed for disks of different speeds, capacities and technologies. The RAIDX hardware consists of an array of disks; the RAIDX software consists of data structures and algorithms that allow the disks to be viewed as a single storage unit that has capacity equal to the sum of the capacities of its disks, failure rate lower than the failure rate of its individual disks, and speeds close to that of its faster disks. RAIDX achieves its performance goals with the aid of its novel parallel data organization technique that allows storage data to be moved on the fly without impacting the upper level file system. We show that storage data accesses satisfy the locality of reference principle, whereby only a small fraction of storage data are accessed frequently. RAIDX has a monitoring program that identifies frequently accessed blocks and a migration program that moves frequently accessed blocks to faster disks. The faster disks are caches that store the solo copy of frequently accessed data. Experimental evaluation has shown that a HDD+SSD RAIDX array is as fast as an all-SSD array when the workload shows locality of reference