Title
Exploration and Exploitation for Buffer-Controlled HDD-Writes for SSD-HDD Hybrid Storage Server
Abstract
AbstractHybrid storage servers combining solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard-drive disks (HDDs) provide cost-effectiveness and μs-level responsiveness for applications. However, observations from cloud storage system Pangu manifest that HDDs are often underutilized while SSDs are overused, especially under intensive writes. It leads to fast wear-out and high tail latency to SSDs. On the other hand, our experimental study reveals that a series of sequential and continuous writes to HDDs exhibit a periodic, staircase-shaped pattern of write latency, i.e., low (e.g., 35 μs), middle (e.g., 55 μs), and high latency (e.g., 12 ms), resulting from buffered writes within HDD’s controller. It inspires us to explore and exploit the potential μs-level IO delay of HDDs to absorb excessive SSD writes without performance degradation.We first build an HDD writing model for describing the staircase behavior and design a profiling process to initialize and dynamically recalibrate the model parameters. Then, we propose a Buffer-Controlled Write approach (BCW) to proactively control buffered writes so that low- and mid-latency periods are scheduled with application data and high-latency periods are filled with padded data. Leveraging BCW, we design a mixed IO scheduler (MIOS) to adaptively steer incoming data to SSDs and HDDs. A multi-HDD scheduling is further designed to minimize HDD-write latency. We perform extensive evaluations under production workloads and benchmarks. The results show that MIOS removes up to 93% amount of data written to SSDs, reduces average and 99th-percentile latencies of the hybrid server by 65% and 85%, respectively.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3465410
ACM Transactions on Storage
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Hybrid storage, IO scheduling, tail latency
Journal
18
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1553-3077
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shucheng Wang112.05
Ziyi Lu212.05
Qiang Cao340.71
Hong Jiang42137157.96
Jie Yao500.34
Yuanyuan Dong664.49
Puyuan Yang742.43
Changsheng Xie836666.54