Using MEMS-Based Storage in Disk Arrays

Current disk arrays, the basic building blocks of high-performance storage systems, are built around two memory technologies: magnetic disk drives, and non-volatile DRAM caches. Disk latencies are higher by six orders of magnitude than non-volatile DRAM access times, but cache costs over 1000 times more per byte. A new storage technology based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will soon offer a new set of performance and cost characteristics that bridge the gap between disk drives and the caches. We evaluate potential gains in performance and cost by incorporating MEMS-based storage in disk arrays. Our evaluation is based on exploring potential placements of MEMS-based storage in a disk array. We used detailed disk array simulators to replay I/O traces of real applications for the evaluation. We show that replacing disks with MEMS-based storage can improve the array performance dramatically, with a cost performance ratio several times better than conventional arrays even if MEMS storage costs ten times as much as disk. We also demonstrate that hybrid MEMS/disk arrays, which cost less than purely MEMS-based arrays, can provide substantial improvements in performance and cost/performance over conventional arrays.

[1]  Mendel Rosenblum,et al.  The design and implementation of a log-structured file system , 1991, SOSP '91.

[2]  Steven W. Schlosser,et al.  Designing Computer Systems with MEMS-based Storage (CMU-CS-00-137) , 2000 .

[3]  Darrell D. E. Long,et al.  Management policies for non-volatile write caches , 1999, 1999 IEEE International Performance, Computing and Communications Conference (Cat. No.99CH36305).

[4]  Masaru Kitsuregawa,et al.  Hot mirroring: a method of hiding parity update penalty and degradation during rebuilds for RAID5 , 1996, SIGMOD '96.

[5]  Stefan Savage,et al.  AFRAID - A Frequently Redundant Array of Independent Disks , 1996, USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

[6]  L. Richard Carley,et al.  MEMS-based integrated-circuit mass-storage systems , 2000, CACM.

[7]  Gregory R. Ganger,et al.  Designing computer systems with MEMS-based storage , 2000, ASPLOS.

[8]  Cyril U. Orji,et al.  Doubly distorted mirrors , 1993, SIGMOD '93.

[9]  Tara M. Madhyastha,et al.  Workload based optimization of probe-based storage , 2002, SIGMETRICS '02.

[10]  RosenblumMendel,et al.  The design and implementation of a log-structured file system , 1991 .

[11]  Dina Bitton,et al.  Disk Shadowing , 1988, VLDB.

[12]  Cyril U. Orji,et al.  Distorted mirrors , 1991, [1991] Proceedings of the First International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Information Systems.

[13]  Flaviu Cristian,et al.  Tolerating Multiple Failures in RAID Architectures with Optimal Storage and Uniform Declustering , 1997, ISCA.

[14]  Qing Yang,et al.  RAPID-Cache-a reliable and inexpensive write cache for disk I/O systems , 1999, Proceedings Fifth International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture.

[15]  Tara M. Madhyastha,et al.  Proceedings of Fast '03: 2nd Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies 2nd Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies Optimizing Probe-based Storage , 2022 .

[16]  Tzi-cker Chiueh.  Trail: a track-based logging disk architecture for zero-overhead writes , 1993, Proceedings of 1993 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design ICCD'93.

[17]  John Wilkes,et al.  My Cache or Yours? Making Storage More Exclusive , 2002, USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track.

[18]  Randy H. Katz,et al.  A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID) , 1988, SIGMOD '88.

[19]  Cyril U. Orji,et al.  Write-only disk caches , 1990, SIGMOD '90.

[20]  Raymie Stata,et al.  Specifying data availability in multi-device file systems , 1990, OPSR.

[21]  John Wilkes.  The Pantheon storage-system simulator , 1996 .

[22]  Hai Jin,et al.  Parity Logging Overcoming the Small Write Problem in Redundant Disk Arrays , 2002 .

[23]  Garth A. Gibson,et al.  RAID: high-performance, reliable secondary storage , 1994, CSUR.

[24]  H KatzRandy,et al.  A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID) , 1988 .

[25]  Gregory R. Ganger,et al.  Modeling and performance of MEMS-based storage devices , 2000, SIGMETRICS '00.

[26]  Philip S. Yu,et al.  Analytic Modeling and Comparisons of Striping Strategies for Replicated Disk Arrays , 1995, IEEE Trans. Computers.

[27]  Yiming Hu,et al.  DCD—disk caching disk: a new approach for boosting I/O performance , 1996, ISCA '96.