Efficient Metadata Update Techniques for Storage Systems
Maohua Lu, Maohua Lu · SUNY Digital Repository Support (State University of New York System) · 2010
The simple read/write interface exposed by traditional disk I/O systems is inadequate for low-locality update-intensive workloads because it limits the flexibility of the disk I/O systems in scheduling disk access requests and results in inefficient use of buffer memory and disk bandwidth. We proposed a novel disk I/O subsystem architecture called Batching mOdifications with Sequential Commit (BOSC), which is optimized for workloads characterized by intensive random updates. BOSC improves the sustained disk update throughput by effectively aggregating disk update operations and sequentially committing them to disk. We demonstrated the benefits of BOSC by adapting it to 3 different storage systems. The first one is a continuous data protection system called Mariner. Mariner i is an iSCSI-based storage system that is designed to provide comprehensive data protection on commodity hardware while offering the same performance as those without any such protection. With