Supporting and Exploiting Heterogeneity in the Storage Stack
Raja Appuswamy, David C. van Moolenbroek, Andrew S. Tanenbaum · Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) · 2011
With the widespread adoption of NAND-flash-based SSDs as a primary storage medium, heterogeneity in storage installations has become a norm rather than an exception. In this paper, we argue that the compatibility-driven traditional storage stack is fundamentally flawed and incapable of supporting and exploiting heterogeneity properly. After highlighting major issues with the traditional stack, we show how Loris, our fresh redesign of the storage stack, supports easy integration of heterogeneous devices with minimal development effort. We also show how Loris, with a few extensions, can be transformed into a flexible, modular framework for implementing several hybrid configurations that exploit heterogeneity in the storage stack.