Isotope: Transactional Isolation for Block Storage

Existing storage stacks are top-heavy and expect little from block storage. As a result, new high-level storage ions – and new designs for existing abstractions – are difficult to realize, requiring developers to implement from scratch complex functionality such as failure atomicity and fine-grained concurrency control. In this paper, we argue that pushing transactional isolation into the block store (in addition to atomicity and durability) is both viable and broadly useful, resulting in simpler highlevel storage systems that provide strong semantics without sacrificing performance. We present Isotope, a new block store that supports ACID transactions over block reads and writes. Internally, Isotope uses a new multiversion concurrency control protocol that exploits finegrained, sub-block parallelism in workloads and offers both strict serializability and snapshot isolation guarantees. We implemented several high-level storage systems over Isotope, including two key-value stor...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: FAST
• Authors: Ji-Yong Shin, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Tudor Marian, Hakim Weatherspoon
• Keywords: FAST 2016, Operating System