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To bridge the giant semantic gap between applications and modern storage systems, passing a piece of tiny and useful information, called I/O access hints, from upper layers to the storage layer may greatly improve application performance and ease data management in storage systems. This is especially true for heterogeneous storage systems that consist of multiple types of storage devices. Since ingesting external access hints will likely involve laborious modifications of legacy I/O stacks, it is very hard to evaluate the effect and take advantages of access hints. In this article, we design a generic and flexible framework, called HintStor, to quickly play with a set of I/O access hints and evaluate their impacts on heterogeneous storage systems. HintStor provides a new application/user-level interface, a file system plugin, and performs data management with a generic block storage data manager. We demonstrate the flexibility of HintStor by evaluating four types of access hints: file system data classification, stream ID, cloud prefetch, and I/O task scheduling on a Linux platform. The results show that HintStor can execute and evaluate various I/O access hints under different scenarios with minor modifications to the kernel and applications. 

Hybrid Shingled Magnetic Recording (H-SMR) drives are the most recently developed SMR drives, which allow dynamic conversion of the recording format between Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) and SMR on a single disk drive. We identify the unique opportunities of H-SMR drives to manage the tradeoffs between performance and capacity, including the possibility of adjusting the SMR area capacity based on storage usage and the flexibility of dynamic data swapping between the CMR area and SMR area. We design and implement FluidSMR, an adaptive management scheme for hybrid SMR Drives, to fully utilize H-SMR drives under different workloads and capacity usages. FluidSMR has a two-phase allocation scheme to support a growing usage of the H-SMR drive. The scheme can intelligently determine the sizes of the CMR and the SMR space in an H-SMR drive based on the dynamic changing of workloads. Moreover, FluidSMR uses a cache in the CMR region, managed by a proposed loop-back log policy, to reduce the overhead of updates to the SMR region. Evaluations using enterprise traces demonstrate that FluidSMR outperforms baseline schemes in various workloads by decreasing the average I/O latency and effectively reducing/controlling the performance impact of the format conversion between CMR and SMR. 

Due to the intrinsic properties of Solid-State Drives (SSDs), invalid data remain in SSDs before erased by a garbage collection process, which increases the risk of being attacked by adversaries. Previous studies use erase and cryptography based schemes to purposely delete target data but face extremely large overhead. In this paper, we propose a Workload-Aware Secure Deletion scheme, called WAS-Deletion, to reduce the overhead of secure deletion by three major components. First, the WASDeletion scheme efficiently splits invalid and valid data into different blocks based on workload characteristics. Second, the WAS-Deletion scheme uses a new encryption allocation scheme, making the encryption follow the same direction as the write on multiple blocks and vertically encrypts pages with the same key in one block. Finally, a new adaptive scheduling scheme can dynamically change the configurations of different regions to further reduce secure deletion overhead based on the current workload. The experimental results indicate that the newly proposed WAS-Deletion scheme can reduce the secure deletion cost by about 1.2x to 12.9x compared to previous studies. 

A hybrid cloud that combines both public and private clouds is becoming more and more popular due to the advantages of improved security, scalability, and guaranteed SLA (Service-Level Agreement) at a lower cost than a separate private or public cloud. The existing studies rarely consider VM migrations in a hybrid cloud environment with dynamically changed VM workloads. From an enterprise’s perspective, these migrations are necessary to minimize the cost of utilizing public clouds and guarantee SLAs of VMs in a hybrid cloud environment. In this paper, we propose an elastic VM allocation and migration algorithm for a hybrid cloud, called E-VM, to fully utilize the resources in a private cloud and to minimize the cost of using a public cloud while guaranteeing the SLAs of all VMs. The E-VM considers the bi-direction migration between private and public clouds. Two components, VM-predictor and VM-selector, are designed and implemented in E-VM to determine if a migration has to be triggered between private and public clouds and which VMs will be migrated to the opposite cloud, respectively. Moreover, E-VM is designed based on the existing public cloud pricing models and can be easily adapted to any cloud service provider. According to simulator results based on a set of captured industrial VM traces/workloads and additional experiments directly on a real-world hybrid cloud, the proposed E-VM can significantly reduce the total cost of using the public cloud compared to the existing VM migration schemes. 

Computer systems utilizing byte-addressable Non-Volatile Memory ( NVM ) as memory/storage can provide low-latency data persistence. The widely used key-value stores using Log-Structured Merge Tree ( LSM-Tree ) are still beneficial for NVM systems in aspects of the space and write efficiency. However, the significant write amplification introduced by the leveled compaction of LSM-Tree degrades the write performance of the key-value store and shortens the lifetime of the NVM devices. The existing studies propose new compaction methods to reduce write amplification. Unfortunately, they result in a relatively large read amplification. In this article, we propose NVLSM, a key-value store for NVM systems using LSM-Tree with new accumulative compaction. By fully utilizing the byte-addressability of NVM, accumulative compaction uses pointers to accumulate data into multiple floors in a logically sorted run to reduce the number of compactions required. We have also proposed a cascading searching scheme for reads among the multiple floors to reduce read amplification. Therefore, NVLSM reduces write amplification with small increases in read amplification. We compare NVLSM with key-value stores using LSM-Tree with two other compaction methods: leveled compaction and fragmented compaction. Our evaluations show that NVLSM reduces write amplification by up to 67% compared with LSM-Tree using leveled compaction without significantly increasing the read amplification. In write-intensive workloads, NVLSM reduces the average latency by 15.73%–41.2% compared to other key-value stores. 

Through the massive use of mobile devices, data clouds, and the rise of Internet of Things, enormous amount of data has been generated and analyzed for the benefit of society. NoSQL Databases and specially key-value stores be­ come the backbone in managing these large amounts of data. Most of key-value stores ignore transactions due to their ef­fect on degrading key-value store's performance. Meanwhile, programmable switches with the software-defined networks and the Programming Protocol-Independent Packet Processor (P4) lead to a programmable network where in-network computa­ tion can help accelerating the performance of applications. In this paper, we proposed a networking support for transaction processing in distributed key-value stores. Our system leverages the programmable switch to act as a transaction coordinator. Using a variation of the time stamp ordering concurrency control approach, the programmable switch can decide to proceed in transaction processing or abort the transaction directly from the network. Our experimental results on an initial prototype show that our proposed approach, while supporting transactions, improves the throughput by up to 4X and reduces the latency by 35% when compared to the existing architectures. 

Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) as a storage medium with high density and long-term preservation properties can satisfy the requirement of archival storage for rapidly increased digital volume. The read and write processes of DNA storage are error-prone. Images widely used in social media have the properties of fault tolerance which are well fitted to the DNA storage. However, prior work simply investigated the feasibility of DNA storage storing different types of data and simply store images in DNA storage, which did not fully investigate the fault-tolerant potential of images in the DNA storage. In this paper, we proposed a new image-based DNA system called IMG-DNA, which can efficiently store images in DNA storage with improved DNA storage robustness. First, a new DNA architecture is proposed to fit JPEG-based images and improve the image’s robustness in DNA storage. Moreover, barriers inserted in DNA sequences efficiently prevent error propagation in images of DNA storage. The experimental results indicate that the proposed IMG-DNA achieves much higher fault-tolerant than prior work.