Blizzard: Fast, Cloud-scale Block Storage for Cloud-oblivious Applications
James W. Mickens, Edmund B. Nightingale, Jeremy Elson, Krishna Nareddy, Darren Gehring, Bin Fan, Osama Khan · 2016
Blizzard is a high-performance block store that ex-poses cloud storage to cloud-oblivious POSIX and Win32 applications. Blizzard connects clients and servers using a network with full-bisection bandwidth, allowing clients to access any remote disk as fast as if it were local. Using a novel striping scheme, Blizzard exposes high disk parallelism to both sequential and ran-dom workloads; also, by decoupling the durability and ordering requirements expressed by flush requests, Bliz-zard can commit writes out-of-order, providing high per-formance and crash consistency to applications that issue many small, random IOs. Blizzard’s virtual disk drive, which clients mount like a normal physical one, provides maximum throughputs of 1200 MB/s, and can improve the performance of unmodified, cloud-oblivious appli-cations by 2x–10x. Compared to EBS, a commercially available, state-of-the-art virtual drive for cloud appli-cations, Blizzard can improve SQL server IOp rates by seven-fold while still providing crash consistency. 1