JoiNS: Meeting latency slo with integrated control for networked storage

Meeting latency SLOs (Service Level Objectives) in a networked storage environment is essential while challenging. In this environment, a storage request has to go through client I/O stacks, dynamically changing networks, and the storage system attached to a server. Its response also has to traverse all the way back to the client. Along this long I/O path, any of these components can become congested. The behavior of one component may affect the performance of the others. Isolated control on each component is not effective to meet latency SLOs of storage requests. In this paper, we propose and implement JoiNS, a system trying to guarantee latency SLO for applications that access data on a remote networked storage. JoiNS carefully considers all the components along the I/O path and controls them in a coordinated fashion. JoiNS has both global network and storage visibilities with a logically centralized controller which keeps monitoring the status of each involved component. JoiNS coordinates these components and adjusts the priority of I/O packets in each component based on the latency SLO, network and storage status, time estimation, and characteristics of each I/O request. We integrate Software Defined Network(SDN) into our system to coordinate with storage. Our evaluation shows JoiNS can achieve up to 6X speedup in this networked storage environment with various loads of background traffic.