FlexBSO: Flexible Block Storage Offload for Datacenters
Vojtech Aschenbrenner, John Shawger, Sadman Sakib

TL;DR
FlexBSO introduces a hardware-assisted approach using SmartNICs to improve virtual block device performance, reduce costs, and increase flexibility in datacenter environments, addressing limitations of traditional virtualization methods.
Contribution
The paper presents FlexBSO, a novel hardware-assisted solution leveraging SmartNICs to optimize virtual block storage offload in datacenters, overcoming cost, flexibility, and performance issues.
Findings
Reduces host CPU cycles for IO operations.
Improves storage virtualization flexibility.
Enhances IO performance by minimizing VM exits.
Abstract
Efficient virtualization of CPU and memory is standardized and mature. Capabilities such as Intel VT-x [3] have been added by manufacturers for efficient hypervisor support. In contrast, virtualization of a block device and its presentation to the virtual machines on the host can be done in multiple ways. Indeed, hyperscalers develop in-house solutions to improve performance and cost-efficiency of their storage solutions for datacenters. Unfortunately, these storage solutions are based on specialized hardware and software which are not publicly available. The traditional solution is to expose virtual block device to the VM through a paravirtualized driver like virtio [2]. virtio provides significantly better performance than real block device driver emulation because of host OS and guest OS cooperation. The IO requests are then fulfilled by the host OS either with a local block device…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCloud Computing and Resource Management · Advanced Data Storage Technologies · IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
