Writeback throttling in a virtualized system with SCM

• Published in: Frontiers of Computer Science Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 82 - 95
• Main Authors: LI, Dingding, LIAO, Xiaofei, JIN, Hai, TANG, Yong, ZHAO, Gansen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Beijing Higher Education Press 01.02.2016; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Computer Science; I/O性能; Performance evaluation; Research Article; storage class memory; Subsystems; System effectiveness; Throttling; Virtual environments; virtualization; writeback; 供应链管理; 可靠性能; 存储子系统; 架构设计; 节流; 虚拟化; 调制解调器; virtualization; writeback; storage class memory
• ISSN: 2095-2228; 2095-2236
• DOI: 10.1007/s11704-015-4217-8

Storage class memory （SCM） has the potential to revolutionize the memory landscape by its non-volatile and byte-addressable properties. However, there is little published work about exploring its usage for modem virtualized cloud infrastructure. We propose SCM-vWrite, a novel architecture designed around SCM, to ease the performance interference of virtualized storage subsystem. Through a case study on a typical virtualized cloud system, we first describe why cur- rent writeback manners are not suitable for a virtualized en- vironment, then design and implement SCM-vWrite to im- prove this problem. We also use typical benchmarks and re- alistic workloads to evaluate its performance. Compared with the traditional method on a conventional architecture, the ex- perimental result shows that SCM-vWrite can coordinate the writeback flows more effectively among multiple co-located guest operating systems, achieving a better disk I/O perfor- mance without any loss of reliability.