Consideration for effectively handling parallel workloads on public cloud system

TL;DR

This paper analyzes parallel storage workloads in a cloud service to develop strategies for building cost-effective hybrid storage systems, focusing on tier assignment and dynamic workload management.

Contribution

It provides insights into workload characteristics and proposes guidelines for optimizing hybrid storage tier placement in cloud environments.

Findings

Regions with high daily IO accesses should be assigned to the first tier.

Dynamic movement of IO-intensive regions improves performance.

Low cache hit ratios suggest workload reallocation to optimize storage use.

Abstract

We retrieved and analyzed parallel storage workloads of the FUJITSU K5 cloud service to clarify how to build cost-effective hybrid storage systems. A hybrid storage system consists of fast but low-capacity tier (first tier) and slow but high-capacity tier (second tier). And, it typically consists of either SSDs and HDDs or NVMs and SSDs. As a result, we found that 1) regions for first tier should be assigned only if a workload includes large number of IO accesses for a whole day, 2) the regions that include a large number of IO accesses should be dynamically chosen and moved from second tier to first tier for a short interval, and 3) if a cache hit ratio is regularly low, use of the cache for the workload should be cancelled, and the whole workload region should be assigned to the region for first tier. These workloads already have been released from the SNIA web site.