A High-Performance Persistent Memory Key-Value Store with Near-Memory Compute

TL;DR

This paper introduces MCAS, a persistent memory key-value store with near-memory compute capabilities, enabling low-latency, durable data storage and complex in-memory data operations for enterprise storage systems.

Contribution

The paper presents the MCAS-ADO system architecture, integrating user-defined in-memory operations for persistent storage, and demonstrates its application in enterprise metadata management for continuous data protection.

Findings

MCAS-ADO achieves low-latency data operations.

Supports complex pointer-based data structures in persistent memory.

Demonstrates effective use in enterprise storage metadata management.

Abstract

MCAS (Memory Centric Active Storage) is a persistent memory tier for high-performance durable data storage. It is designed from the ground-up to provide a key-value capability with low-latency guarantees and data durability through memory persistence and replication. To reduce data movement and make further gains in performance, we provide support for user-defined "push-down" operations (known as Active Data Objects) that can execute directly and safely on the value-memory associated with one or more keys. The ADO mechanism allows complex pointer-based dynamic data structures (e.g., trees) to be stored and operated on in persistent memory. To this end, we examine a real-world use case for MCAS-ADO in the handling of enterprise storage system metadata for Continuous Data Protection (CDP). This requires continuously updating complex metadata that must be kept consistent and durable. In this paper, we i.) present the MCAS-ADO system architecture, ii.) show how the CDP use case is implemented, and finally iii.) give an evaluation of system performance in the context of this use case.