For over 30 years, disk has been the dominant storage medium for most applications. Although disk technology is advancing at a rapid rate, notably in storage density, the mechanical latency of disk has improved little compared to other electronic components such as memory and CPU. As a result, system designers do all kinds of disk-related optimizations throughout all levels of storage stack to hide this mechanical latency, including disk I/O scheduling, disk read ahead, buffered write, disk caching, and file system. As a consequence, disk-related complexity is proliferating, and the storage substrate has become one of the largest and most complex components in modern operating systems. The legacy assumption of disk storage has spread from file system, memory management to device driver. In this project, DSI researchers address above architectural challenges by optimizing the file system stacks and memory management to effectively integrate NVM into storage system architecture.
Architecture of NVM based file system stacks by DSI
Our initial prototype system test results show MySQL Database performance running on DSI’s optimized NVM system stacks can outperform standard system by 9 times:
