SieveStore: a highly-selective, ensemble-level disk cache for cost-performance

  • Authors:

  • Timothy Pritchett;Mithuna Thottethodi

  • Affiliations:

  • Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA;Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 37th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Emerging solid-state storage media can significantly improve storage performance and energy. However, the high cost-per-byte of solid-state media has hindered wide-spread adoption in servers. This paper proposes a new, cost-effective architecture - SieveStore - which enables the use of solid-state media to significantly filter access to storage ensembles. Our paper makes three key contributions. First, we make a case for highly-selective, storage-ensemble-level disk-block caching based on the highly-skewed block popularity distribution and based on the dynamic nature of the popular block set. Second, we identify the problem of allocation-writes and show that selective cache allocation to reduce allocation-writes - sieving - is fundamental to enable efficient ensemble-level disk-caching. Third, we propose two practical variants of SieveStore. Based on week-long block access traces from a storage ensemble of 13 servers, we find that the two components (sieving and ensemble-level caching) each contribute to SieveStore's cost-effectiveness. Compared to unsieved, ensemble-level disk-caches, SieveStore achieves significantly higher hit ratios (35%-50% more, on average) while using only 1/7th the number of SSD drives. Further, ensemble-level caching is strictly better in cost-performance compared to per-server caching.