Transactional workloads have storage request streams consisting of many small, independent, random requests. Flash memory is well suited to these types of access patterns, but is not always cost-effective. This thesis presents a novel storage architecture called the SD Storage Array (SDSA), which adopts a many-device approach. It utilizes many flash storage devices in the form of an array of Secure Digital (SD) cards. This approach leverages the commodity status of SD cards to pursue a cost-effective means of providing the high throughput that transactional workloads require. Characterization of a prototype revealed that when the request stream was 512B randomly addressed reads, the SDSA provided 1.5 times the I/O operations per second (IOPS) of a top-of-the-line solid state drive, provided there were at least eight requests in-flight. A scale-out simulation showed the IOPS should scale with the size of the array, provided there are no upstream bottlenecks.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/42978 |
| Date | 29 November 2013 |
| Creators | Katsuno, Ian |
| Contributors | Moshovos, Andreas |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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