sRoute: Treating the Storage Stack Like a Network

In a data center, an IO from an application to distributed storage traverses not only the network, but also several software stages with diverse functionality. This set of ordered stages is known as the storage or IO stack. Stages include caches, hypervisors, IO schedulers, file systems, and device drivers. Indeed, in a typical data center, the number of these stages is often larger than the number of network hops to the destination. Yet, while packet routing is fundamental to networks, no notion of IO routing exists on the storage stack. The path of an IO to an endpoint is predetermined and hard-coded. This forces IO with different needs (e.g., requiring different caching or replica selection) to flow through a one-size-fits-all IO stack structure, resulting in an ossified IO stack. This paper proposes sRoute, an architecture that prorouting abstraction for the storage stack. sRoute comprises a centralized control plane and “sSwitches” on the data plane. The control plane set...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: FAST
• Authors: Ioan A. Stefanovici, Bianca Schroeder, Greg O'Shea, Eno Thereska
• Keywords: FAST 2016, Operating System