Zonealloy: Elastic data and space management for hybrid SMR drives

Fenggang Wu, Bingzhe Li, Zhichao Cao, Baoquan Zhang, Ming Hong Yang, Hao Wen, David H.C. Du

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

The emergence of Hybrid Shingled Magnetic Recording (H-SMR) allows dynamic conversion of the recording format between Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) and SMR on a single disk drive. H-SMR is promising for its ability to manage the performance/capacity trade-off on the disk platters and to adaptively support different application scenarios in large-scale storage systems. However, there is little research on how to efficiently manage data and space in such H-SMR drives. In this paper, we present ZoneAlloy, an elastic data and space management scheme for H-SMR drives, to explore the benefit of using such drives. ZoneAlloy initially allocates CMR space for the application and then gradually converts the disk format from CMR to SMR to create more space for the application. ZoneAlloy controls the overhead of the format conversion on the application I/O with our quantized migration mechanism. When data is stored in an SMR area, ZoneAlloy reduces the SMR update overhead using H-Buffer and Zone-Swap. H-Buffer is a small host-controlled CMR space that absorbs the SMR updates and migrates those updates back to the SMR space in batches to bring down the SMR update cost. Zone-Swap dynamically swaps “hot” data from the SMR space to the CMR space to further alleviate the SMR update problem. Evaluation results based on MSR-Cambridge traces demonstrate that ZoneAlloy can reduce the average I/O latency and limit the performance degradation of the application I/O during format conversion.

Original languageEnglish (US)
StatePublished - 2019
Event11th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems, HotStorage 2019, co-located with USENIX ATC 2019 - Renton, United States
Duration: Jul 8 2019Jul 9 2019

Conference

Conference11th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems, HotStorage 2019, co-located with USENIX ATC 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityRenton
Period7/8/197/9/19

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The emerging hybrid SMR drive with a mix of CMR and SMR zones provides the flexibility to convert the disk format on demand. We design and implement ZoneAlloy, an elastic data and space management scheme that hides the H-SMR details and presents an elastic data space to the application. Such elastic data space has an extendable size, which is supported by the two-phase allocation design. ZoneAlloy has a quantized migration mechanism to help applications make a good trade-off to perform conversion efficiently while bounding their performance degradation. ZoneAlloy also leverages the proposed H-Buffer and Zone-Swap to reduce the SMR update overhead. Evaluations show that ZoneAlloy can improve the I/O performance from the baseline schemes and can perform format conversion with bounded performance degradation.

Publisher Copyright:
© USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems, HotStorage 2019, co-located with USENIX ATC 2019.All right reserved.

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