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NAND flash-based Solid State Devices (SSDs) offer the desirable features of high performance, energy efficiency, and fast growing capacity. Thus, the use of SSDs is increasing in distributed storage systems. A key obstacle in this context is that the natural unbalance in distributed I/O workloads can result in wear imbalance across the SSDs in a distributed setting. This, in turn can have significant impact on the reliability, performance, and lifetime of the storage deployment. Extant load balancers for storage systems do not consider SSD wear imbalance when placing data, as the main design goal of such balancers is to extract higher performance. Consequently, data migration is the only common technique for tackling wear imbalance, where existing data is moved from highly loaded servers to the least loaded ones. In this paper, we explore an innovative holistic approach, Chameleon, that employs data redundancy techniques such as replication and erasure-coding, coupled with endurance-aware write offloading, to mitigate wear level imbalance in distributed SSD-based storage. Chameleon aims to balance the wear among different flash servers while meeting desirable objectives of: extending life of flash servers; improving I/O performance; and avoiding bottlenecks. Evaluation with a 50 node SSD cluster shows that Chameleon reduces the wear distribution deviation by 81% while improving the write performance by up to 33%.
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Wear leveling in SSDs considered harmful
We argue that wear leveling in SSDs does more harm than good under modern settings where the endurance limit is in the hundreds. To support this claim, we evaluate existing wear leveling techniques and show that they exhibit anomalous behaviors and produce a high write amplification. These findings are consistent with a recent large-scale field study on the operational characteristics of SSDs. We discuss the option of forgoing wear leveling and instead adopting capacity variance in SSDs, and show that the capacity variance extends the lifetime of the SSD by up to 2.94×.
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- PAR ID:
- 10374261
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 14th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 72 to 78
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3538643.3539750
