Optimized adoption of NVM storage by considering workload characteristics

Abstract

This paper presents an optimized adoption of NVM for the storage system of heterogeneous applications. Our analysis shows that a bulk of I/O does not happen on a single storage partition, but it is varied significantly for different application categories. In particular, journaling I/O accounts for a dominant portion of total I/O in DB applications like OLTP, whereas swap I/O accounts for a large portion of I/O in graph visualization applications, and file I/O accounts for a large portion in web browsers and multimedia players. Based on these observations, we argue that maximizing the performance gain with NVM is not obtained by fixing it as a specific storage partition but varied widely for different applications. Specifically, for graph visualization, DB, and multimedia player applications, using NVM as a swap, a journal, and a file system partitions, respectively, performs well. Our optimized adoption of NVM improves the storage performance by 10-61%. © 2017, Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea. All rights reserved.