STEP: Sequentiality and Thrashing Detection Based Prefetching to Improve Performance of Networked Storage Servers

State-of-the-art networked storage servers are equipped with increasingly powerful computing capability and large DRAM memory as storage caches. However, their contribution to the performance improvement of networked storage system has become increasingly limited. This is because the client-side memory sizes are also increasing, which reduces capacity misses in the client buffer caches as well as access locality in the storage servers, thus weakening the caching effectiveness of server storage caches. Proactive caching in storage servers is highly desirable to reduce cold misses in clients. We propose an effective way to improve the utilization of storage server resources through prefetching in storage servers for clients. In particular, our design well utilizes two unique strengths of networked storage servers which are not leveraged in existing storage server prefetching schemes. First, powerful storage servers have idle CPU cycles, under-utilized disk bandwidth, and abundant memory...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Shuang Liang, Song Jiang, Xiaodong Zhang
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCS 2007, Networked Storage, Networked Storage Servers, Storage Servers