Container-based virtualization for byte-addressable NVM data storage
Ellis R. Giles · 2016
Container based virtualization is rapidly growing in popularity for cloud deployments and applications as a virtualization alternative due to the ease of deployment coupled with high-performance. Emerging byte-addressable, nonvolatile memories, commonly called Storage Class Memory or SCM, technologies are promising both byte-addressability and persistence near DRAM speeds operating on the main memory bus. These new memory alternatives open up a new realm of applications that no longer have to rely on slow, block-based persistence, but can rather operate directly on persistent data using ordinary loads and stores through the cache hierarchy coupled with transaction techniques. However, SCM presents a new challenge for container-based applications, which typically access persistent data through layers of block based file isolation. Traditional persistent data accesses in containers are performed through layered file access, which slows byte-addressable persistence and transactional guarantees, or through direct access to drivers, which do not provide for isolation guarantees or security. This paper presents a high-performance containerized version of byte-addressable, non-volatile memory (SCM) for applications running inside a container that solves performance challenges while providing isolation guarantees. We created an open-source container-aware Linux loadable Kernel Module (LKM) called Containerized Storage Class Memory, or CSCM, that presents SCM for application isolation and ease of portability. We performed evaluation using microbenchmarks, STREAMS, and Redis, a popular in-memory data structure store, and found our CSCM driver has near the same memory throughput for SCM applications as a non-containerized application running on a host and much higher throughput than persistent in-memory applications accessing SCM through Docker Storage or Volumes.