Customized Interfaces for Modern Storage Devices Dissertation

(2017). Customized Interfaces for Modern Storage Devices . 10.25148/etd.FIDC001816

thesis or dissertation chair

authors

  • Marmol, Leonardo

abstract

  • In the past decade, we have seen two major evolutions on storage technologies: flash storage and non-volatile memory. These storage technologies are both vastly different in their properties and implementations than the disk-based storage devices that current soft- ware stacks and applications have been built for and optimized over several decades. The second major trend that the industry has been witnessing is new classes of applications that are moving away from the conventional ACID (SQL) database access to storage. The resulting new class of NoSQL and in-memory storage applications consume storage using entirely new application programmer interfaces than their predecessors. The most significant outcome given these trends is that there is a great mismatch in terms of both application access interfaces and implementations of storage stacks when consuming these new technologies.

    In this work, we study the unique, intrinsic properties of current and next-generation storage technologies and propose new interfaces that allow application developers to get the most out of these storage technologies without having to become storage experts them- selves. We first build a new type of NoSQL key-value (KV) store that is FTL-aware rather than flash optimized. Our novel FTL cooperative design for KV store proofed to simplify development and outperformed state of the art KV stores, while reducing write amplification. Next, to address the growing relevance of byte-addressable persistent memory, we build a new type of KV store that is customized and optimized for persistent memory. The resulting KV store illustrates how to program persistent effectively while exposing a simpler interface and performing better than more general solutions. As the final component of the thesis, we build a generic, native storage solution for byte-addressable persistent memory. This new solution provides the most generic interface to applications, allow- ing applications to store and manipulate arbitrarily structured data with strong durability and consistency properties. With this new solution, existing applications as well as new “green field” applications will get to experience native performance and interfaces that are customized for the next storage technology evolution.

publication date

  • March 31, 2017

keywords

  • Computer Science

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)