Design and Development of Enterprise Storage Systems with Hybrid Disks for Future Datacenters

A hybrid disk consists of a small amount of NonVolatile flash Memory (NVM) as fast storage media to complement the rotational magnetic recording disk, normally considered slow but with large storage capacity. In this paper, we present the design and development work of an enterprise hybrid disk drive storage system for future datacenter. We also design a new type of dynamic cache algorithms that can simplify cache management architecture and enhance operation performance. Evaluation with enterprise storage workloads shows that the average IOPS (Input/Output per second) can be increased up to 300% and can outperform the IOPS of high speed enterprise SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) disk drive for certain workloads. Another advantage of hybrid disk drive is power saving, for which the power consumption can be reduced by more than 50%, compared with the enterprise hard disk drive. We envision that hybrid disks can be a cost-effective replacement of high speed hard disks in enterprise storage systems that empower datacenters with large storage capacity, high performance and low energy consumption.