RackBlox: A Software-Defined Rack-Scale Storage System with Network-Storage Co-Design
Benjamin Reidys, Yuqi Xue, Daixuan Li, Bharat Sukhwani, Wen-mei Hwu,, Deming Chen, Sameh Asaad, Jian Huang

TL;DR
RackBlox is a novel rack-scale storage system that co-designs SDN and SDF to optimize end-to-end performance, resource management, and SSD longevity through integrated control and data plane coordination.
Contribution
It introduces a unified architecture that redefines control plane functions, enabling coordinated I/O scheduling, garbage collection, and wear leveling across rack-scale SSDs.
Findings
Reduces tail latency by up to 5.8x compared to existing systems.
Enables global wear leveling for improved SSD lifespan.
Facilitates efficient end-to-end storage performance management.
Abstract
Software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined flash (SDF) have been serving as the backbone of modern data centers. They are managed separately to handle I/O requests. At first glance, this is a reasonable design by following the rack-scale hierarchical design principles. However, it suffers from suboptimal end-to-end performance, due to the lack of coordination between SDN and SDF. In this paper, we co-design the SDN and SDF stack by redefining the functions of their control plane and data plane, and splitting up them within a new architecture named RackBlox. RackBlox decouples the storage management functions of flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), and allow the SDN to track and manage the states of SSDs in a rack. Therefore, we can enable the state sharing between SDN and SDF, and facilitate global storage resource management. RackBlox has three major components: (1)…
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