LightStore boosts efficiency of flash storage in data centers
MIT researchers have designed a novel flash-storage system that could cut in half the energy and physical space required for one of the most expensive components of data centers: data storage.
Data centers are server farms that facilitate communication between users and web services, and are some of the most energy-consuming facilities in the world. In them, thousands of power-hungry servers store user data, and separate servers run app services that access that data. Other servers sometimes facilitate the computation between those two server clusters.
Most storage servers today use solid-state drives (SSDs), which use flash storage — electronically programmable and erasable memory microchips with no moving parts — to handle high-throughput data requests at high speeds. In a paper being presented at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, the researchers describe a new system called LightStore that modifies SSDs to connect directly to a data center’s network — without needing any other components — and to support computationally simpler and more efficient data-storage operations. Further software and hardware innovations seamlessly integrate the system into existing data center infrastructure.
In experiments, the researchers found a cluster of four LightStore units, called storage nodes, ran twice as efficiently as traditional storage servers, measured by the power consumption needed to field data requests. The cluster also required less than half the physical space occupied by existing servers.
For LightStore, the researchers first modified SSDs to be accessed in terms of “key-value pairs,” a very simple and efficient protocol for retrieving data. Basically, user requests appear as keys, like a string of numbers. Keys are sent to a server, which releases the data (value) associated with that key.
The concept is simple, but keys can be extremely large, so computing (searching and inserting) them solely in SSD requires a lot of computation power, which is used up by traditional “flash translation layer.” This fairly complex software runs on a separate module on a flash drive to manage and move around data. The researchers used certain data-structuring techniques to run this flash management software using only a fraction of computing power. In doing so, they offloaded the software entirely onto a tiny circuit in the flash drive that runs far more efficiently.
More information at https://news.mit.edu/2019/solid-state-drives-flash-storage-data-center-efficiency-0403
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