Abstract
Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives can benefit large-scale storage systems by reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of dealing with explosive data growth. Among all existing SMR models, Host Aware SMR (HA-SMR) looks the most promising for its backward compatibility with legacy I/O stacks and its ability to use new SMR-specific APIs to support host I/O stack optimization. Building storage systems using HA-SMR drives calls for a deep understanding of the drive's performance characteristics. To accomplish this, we conduct in-depth performance evaluations on HA-SMR drives with a special emphasis on the performance implications of the SMR-specific APIs and how these drives can be deployed in large storage systems. We discover both favorable and adverse effects of using HA-SMR drives under various workloads. We also investigate the drive's performance under legacy production environments using real-world enterprise traces. Finally, we propose a novel host-controlled buffer that can help to reduce the severity of the decline in HA-SMR performance under our discovered unfavorable I/O access patterns. Without a detailed comprehensive design, we show the potential of the host-controlled buffer by a case study.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 7942044 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1932-1945 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Computers |
| Volume | 66 |
| Issue number | 11 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 1 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work is partially supported by NSF I/UCRC Center for Research in Intelligent Storage (CRIS) and the US National Science Foundation under awards: 1525617, 1439622, 1305237, and 1421913.
Publisher Copyright:
© 1968-2012 IEEE.
Keywords
- H-Buffer
- Host Aware SMR
- characterization
- system implication