Implementing Flash-Cached Storage Systems Using Computational Storage Drive with Built-in Transparent Compression

Abstract

This paper studies utilizing the growing family of solid-state drives (SSDs) with built-in transparent compression to simplify the data structure of cache design. Such storage hardware allows the user applications to intentionally under-utilize logical storage space (i.e., sparse LBA utilization, and sparse storage block content) without sacrificing the physical storage space. Accordingly, this work proposed an index-less cache management approach to largely simplify the flash-based cache management by leveraging SSDs with built-in transparent compression. We carried out various experiments to evaluate the write amplification and read performance of the proposed cache management, and the results show that our proposed indexless cache management can achieve comparable or much better performance than the conventional policies while consuming much less host computing and memory resources.