FlashCoop: A Locality-Aware Cooperative Buffer Management for SSD-Based Storage Cluster

Random writes significantly limit the application of flash-based Solid State Drive (SSD) in enterprise environment due to its poor latency, negative impact on SSD lifetime and high garbage collection overhead. To release above limitations, we propose a locality-aware cooperative buffer scheme referred to as FlashCoop (Flash Cooperation), which leverages free memory of neighboring storage server to buffer writes over high speed network. Both temporal and sequential localities of access pattern are exploited in the design of cooperative buffer management. Leveraging the filtering effect of the cooperative buffer, FlashCoop can efficiently shape the I/O request stream and improve the sequentiality of the write accesses passed to the SSD. FlashCoop has been extensively evaluated under various enterprise workloads. Our benchmark results conclusively demonstrate that FlashCoop can achieve 52.3% performance improvement and 56.5% garbage collection overhead reduction compared to the system without FlashCoop.