A PRAM and NAND flash hybrid architecture for high-performance embedded storage subsystems
EMSOFT '08 Proceedings of the 8th ACM international conference on Embedded software
Phase-change random access memory: a scalable technology
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Architecting phase change memory as a scalable dram alternative
Proceedings of the 36th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Scalable high performance main memory system using phase-change memory technology
Proceedings of the 36th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Operating system support for NVM+DRAM hybrid main memory
HotOS'09 Proceedings of the 12th conference on Hot topics in operating systems
Onyx: a protoype phase change memory storage array
HotStorage'11 Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX conference on Hot topics in storage and file systems
Hybrid DRAM/PRAM-based main memory for single-chip CPU/GPU
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Design Automation Conference
PreSET: improving performance of phase change memories by exploiting asymmetry in write times
Proceedings of the 39th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture
Flash caching on the storage client
USENIX ATC'13 Proceedings of the 2013 USENIX conference on Annual Technical Conference
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Storage systems based on Phase Change Memory (PCM) devices are beginning to generate considerable attention in both industry and academic communities. But whether the technology in its current state will be a commercially and technically viable alternative to entrenched technologies such as flash-based SSDs remains undecided. To address this it is important to consider PCM SSD devices not just from a device standpoint, but also from a holistic perspective. This paper presents the results of our performance study of a recent all-PCM SSD prototype. The average latency for a 4 KiB random read is 6.7 µs, which is about 16× faster than a comparable eMLC flash SSD. The distribution of I/O response times is also much narrower than flash SSD for both reads and writes. Based on the performance measurements and real-world workload traces, we explore two typical storage use-cases: tiering and caching. For tiering, we model a hypothetical storage system that consists of flash, HDD, and PCM to identify the combinations of device types that offer the best performance within cost constraints. For caching, we study whether PCM can improve performance compared to flash in terms of aggregate I/O time and read latency. We report that the IOPS/$ of a tiered storage system can be improved by 12-66% and the aggregate elapsed time of a server-side caching solution can be improved by up to 35% by adding PCM. Our results show that - even at current price points - PCM storage devices show promising performance as a new component in enterprise storage systems.