Beyond block I/O: Rethinking traditional storage primitives

Over the last twenty years the interfaces for accessing persistent storage within a computer system have remained essentially unchanged. Simply put, seek, read and write have defined the fundamental operations that can be performed against storage devices. These three interfaces have endured because the devices within storage subsystems have not fundamentally changed since the invention of magnetic disks. Non-volatile (flash) memory (NVM) has recently become a viable enterprise grade storage medium. Initial implementations of NVM storage devices have chosen to export these same disk-based seek/read/write interfaces because they provide compatibility for legacy applications. We propose there is a new class of higher order storage primitives beyond simple block I/O that high performance solid state storage should support. One such primitive, atomic-write, batches multiple I/O operations into a single logical group that will be persisted as a whole or rolled back upon failure. By movin...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Xiangyong Ouyang, David W. Nellans, Robert Wipfel, David Flynn, Dhabaleswar K. Panda
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPCA 2011, InnoDB Transactional Storage, Storage Device, Storage Subsystem