Hystor: making the best use of solid state drives in high performance storage systems

With the fast technical improvement, flash memory based Solid State Drives (SSDs) are becoming an important part of the computer storage hierarchy to significantly improve performance and energy efficiency. However, due to its relatively high price and low capacity, a major system research issue to address is on how to make SSDs play their most effective roles in a high-performance storage system in cost- and performance-effective ways. In this paper, we will answer several related questions with insights based on the design and implementation of a high performance hybrid storage system, called Hystor. We make the best use of SSDs in storage systems by achieving a set of optimization objectives from both system deployment and algorithm design perspectives. Hystor manages both SSDs and hard disk drives (HDDs) as one single block device with minimal changes to existing OS kernels. By monitoring I/O access patterns at runtime, Hystor can effectively identify blocks that (1) can result...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICS
• Authors: Feng Chen, David A. Koufaty, Xiaodong Zhang
• Keywords: Ash Memory, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICS 2011, Performance Merits, Performance Storage System