Client-side flash caching for cloud systems

As the size of cloud systems and the number of hosted VMs rapidly grow, the scalability of shared VM storage systems becomes a serious issue. Client-side flash-based caching has the potential to improve the performance of cloud VM storage by employing flash storage available on the client-side of the storage system to exploit the locality inherent in VM IOs. However, because of the limited capacity and durability of flash storage, it is important to determine the proper size and configuration of the flash caches used in cloud systems. This paper provides answers to the key design questions of cloud flash caching based on dm-cache, a block-level caching solution customized for cloud environments, and a large amount of long-term traces collected from real-world public and private clouds. The study first validates that cloud workloads have good cacheability and dm-cache-based flash caching incurs low overhead with respect to commodity flash devices. It further reveals that write-back caching substantially outperforms write-through caching in typical cloud environments due to the reduction of server IO load. It also shows that there is a tradeoff on making a flash cache persistent across client restarts which saves hours of cache warm-up time but incurs considerable overhead from committing every metadata update persistently. Finally, to reduce the data loss risk from using write-back caching, the paper proposes a new cache-optimized RAID technique, which minimizes the RAID overhead by introducing redundancy of cache dirty data only, and shows to be significantly faster than traditional RAID and write-through caching.