MIST: Mitigating Host-Side Interference for Storage Traffic in Virtualized Data Centers

In today's data centers, storage hardware is getting virtualized and shared across multiple tenants. The storage virtualization is expected to significantly increase resource utilization, and consequently provide infrastructure providers with tremendous cost savings. In a shared environment, however, demanding tenants can severely impact the IO performance of co-located tenants. Therefore, in order to properly materialize expected benefits, it is important to provide virtualized IO traffic with performance isolation and a certain level of assured performance. Unfortunately, most prior work typically provided partial solutions by focusing on a single performance bottleneck, e.g., IO scheduler. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of MIST that can significantly mitigate the impact of IO performance interference. To achieve the goal, we devise a novel interference detection metric, Icpu, and use a collection of control mechanisms that exploit the knobs provided by modern operating systems. Through the evaluation based on our MIST prototype, we demonstrate that MIST can provide effective protection for IO traffic against a wide range of interfering workloads. Moreover, we show that MIST has low performance overhead for its control actions.