SuperCell: Adaptive Software-Defined Storage for Cloud Storage Workloads

The explosive growth of data due to the increasing adoption of cloud technologies in the enterprise has created a strong demand for more flexible, cost-effective, and scalable storage solutions. Many storage systems, however, are not well matched to the workloads they service due to the difficulty of configuring the storage system optimally a priori with only approximate knowledge of the workload characteristics. This paper shows how cloud-based orchestration can be leveraged to create flexible storage solutions that use continuous adaptation to tailor themselves to their target application workloads, and in doing so, provide superior performance, cost, and scalability over traditional fixed designs. To demonstrate this approach, we have built "SuperCell," a Ceph-based distributed storage solution with a recommendation engine for the storage configuration. SuperCell provides storage operators with real-time recommendations on how to reconfigure the storage system to optimize its performance, cost, and efficiency based on statistical storage modeling and data analysis of the actual workload. Using real cloud storage workloads, we experimentally demonstrate that SuperCell reduces the cost of storage systems by up to 48%, while meeting service level agreement (SLA) 99% of the time, a level that any static design fails to meet for the workloads.