Enlightening Flash Storage to Stream Writes by Objects

TL;DR

This paper introduces FlashAlloc, a novel interface for flash storage that enables object-aware write streaming, reducing write amplification and improving performance for data stores by de-multiplexing writes from different objects.

Contribution

The paper proposes FlashAlloc, an object-aware flash storage interface that enables transparent write streaming by objects, reducing write amplification and enhancing throughput.

Findings

FlashAlloc reduces write amplification in RocksDB, F2FS, and MySQL.

FlashAlloc doubles throughput in multitenant scenarios.

Object-aware streaming mitigates interference among multiple tenants.

Abstract

For a write request, today flash storage cannot distinguish the logical object it comes from. In such object-oblivious flash devices, concurrent writes from different objects are simply packed in their arrival order to flash memory blocks; hence objects with different lifetimes are multiplexed onto the same flash blocks. This multiplexing incurs write amplification, worsening the performance. Tackling the multiplexing problem, we propose a novel interface for flash storage, FlashAlloc. It is used to pass the logical address ranges of logical objects to the flash storage and thus enlighten the storage to stream writes by objects. The object-aware flash storage can de-multiplex writes from different objects with distinct deathtimes into per-object dedicated flash blocks. Given that popular data stores separate writes using objects (e.g., SSTables in RocksDB), we can achieve, unlike the existing solutions, transparent write streaming just by calling FlashAlloc upon object creation. Our experimental results using an open-source SSD prototype demonstrate that FlashAlloc can reduce write amplification factor (WAF) in RocksDB, F2FS, and MySQL by 1.5, 2.5, and 0.3, respectively and thus improve throughput by 2x, 1.8x, and 1.2x, respectively. In particular, FlashAlloc will mitigate the interference among multitenants. When RocksDB and MySQL were run together on the same SSD, FlashAlloc decreased WAF from 4.2 to 2.5 and doubled their throughputs.