Blizzard: fast, cloud-scale block storage for cloud-oblivious applications

  • Authors:

  • James Mickens;Edmund B. Nightingale;Jeremy Elson;Krishna Nareddy;Darren Gehring;Bin Fan;Asim Kadav;Vijay Chidambaram;Osama Khan

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research;Carnegie Mellon University;University of Wisconsin-Madison;University of Wisconsin-Madison;Johns Hopkins University

  • Venue:
  • NSDI'14 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

Blizzard is a high-performance block store that exposes cloud storage to cloud-oblivious POSIX and Win32 applications. Blizzard connects clients and servers using a network with full-bisection bandwidth, allowing clients to access any remote disk as fast as if it were local. Using a novel striping scheme, Blizzard exposes high disk parallelism to both sequential and random workloads; also, by decoupling the durability and ordering requirements expressed by flush requests, Blizzard can commit writes out-of-order, providing high performance and crash consistency to applications that issue many small, random IOs. Blizzard's virtual disk drive, which clients mount like a normal physical one, provides maximum throughputs of 1200 MB/s, and can improve the performance of unmodified, cloud-oblivious applications by 2x-10x. Compared to EBS, a commercially available, state-of-the-art virtual drive for cloud applications, Blizzard can improve SQL server IOp rates by seven-fold while still providing crash consistency.