Decoupling Datacenter Storage Studies from Access to Large-Scale Applications

Christina Delimitrou Stanford

Sriram Sankar Microsoft

Kushagra Vaid Microsoft

Christos Kozyrakis Stanford

IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, 2012


Abstract

Suboptimal storage design has significant cost and power impact in large-scale datacenters. This article presents a modeling and generation framework for storage applications that captures spatial and temporal locality and I/O intensity, recreates application I/O loads, and enables storage-system studies without access to application code or full deployments. The methodology is validated with production traces and applied to SSD caching and defragmentation.