I/O Workload Management for All-Flash Datacenter Storage Systems Based on Total Cost of Ownership

Abstract

Recently, the capital expenditure of flash-based Solid State Driver (SSDs) keeps declining and the storage capacity of SSDs keeps increasing. As a result, all-flash storage systems have started to become more economically viable for large shared storage installations in datacenters, where metrics like Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) are of paramount importance. On the other hand, flash devices suffer from write amplification, which, if unaccounted, can substantially increase the TCO of a storage system. In this paper, we first develop a TCO model for datacenter all-flash storage systems, and then plug a Write Amplification model (WAF) of NVMe SSDs we build based on empirical data into this TCO model. Our new WAF model accounts for workload characteristics like write rate and percentage of sequential writes. Furthermore, using both the TCO and WAF models as the optimization criterion, we design new flash resource management schemes (MINTCO) to guide datacenter managers to make workload allocation decisions under the consideration of TCO for SSDs. Based on that, we also develop MINTCO-RAID to support RAID SSDs and MINTCO-OFFLINE to optimize the offline workload-disk deployment problem during the initialization phase. Experimental results show that MINTCO can reduce the TCO and keep relatively high throughput and space utilization of the entire datacenter storage resources.