PDL Abstract

Enabling Enterprise Solid State Disks Performance

1st Workshop on Integrating Solid-state Memory into the Storage Hierarchy, March 7, 2009,
Washington DC.

Milo Polte, Jiri Simsa, Garth A. Gibson

School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

In this paper, we examine two modern enterprise Flash-based solid state devices and how varying usage patterns influence the performance one observes from the device. We observe that in order to achieve peak sequential and random performance of an SSD, a workload needs to meet certain criteria such as high degree of concurrency. We measure the performance effects of intermediate operating system software layers between the application and device, varying the filesystem, I/O Scheduler, and whether or not the device is accessed in direct mode. Finally, we measure and discuss how device performance may degrade under sustained random write access across an SSD’s full address space.

FULL PAPER: pdf