BlockFlex: Enabling Storage Harvesting with Software-Defined Flash in Modern Cloud Platforms

Benjamin Reidys, Jinghan Sun, Anirudh Badam, Shadi Noghabi, Jian Huang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Cloud platforms today make efficient use of storage resources by slicing them among multi-tenant applications on demand. However, our study discloses that cloud storage is still seriously underutilized for both allocated and unallocated storage. Although cloud providers have developed harvesting techniques to allow evictable virtual machines (VMs) to use unallocated resources, these techniques cannot be directly applied to storage resources, due to the lack of systematic support for the isolation of space, bandwidth, and data security in storage devices. In this paper, we present BlockFlex, a learning-based storage harvesting framework, which can harvest available flash-based storage resources at a fine-grained granularity in modern cloud platforms. We rethink the abstractions of storage virtualization and enable transparent harvesting of both allocated and unallocated storage for evictable VMs. BlockFlex explores both heuristics and learning-based approaches to maximize the storage utilization, while ensuring the performance and security isolation between regular and evictable VMs at the storage device level. We develop BlockFlex with programmable solid-state drives (SSDs) and demonstrate its efficiency with various datacenter workloads.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 16th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2022
PublisherUSENIX Association
Pages17-33
Number of pages17
ISBN (Electronic)9781939133281
StatePublished - 2022
Event16th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2022 - Carlsbad, United States
Duration: Jul 11 2022Jul 13 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 16th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2022

Conference

Conference16th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityCarlsbad
Period7/11/227/13/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'BlockFlex: Enabling Storage Harvesting with Software-Defined Flash in Modern Cloud Platforms'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this