NVM-Accelerated Metadata Management for Flash-Based SSDs

Data storage system is a de facto building brick for the cloud framework. The advent of byte-addressable non-volatile memory (NVM) brings in new opportunities to optimize conventional storage systems. In this paper, we propose to utilize the NVM to separate and manage metadata of file systems for flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs). The SSD has made impressive strides in the persistent storage of enterprise servers, personal computers and mobile devices. However, it suffers fromhandling the file system metadata which are mostly small andfrequently used. We hence separate metadata from data and give the former a second chance to be cached in a NVM-based buffer cache. To closely collaborate with metadata management modules, the flash translation layer (FTL) of the SSD is also promoted to the NVM. Experimental results based on Linux and a real SSD board show that, our proposal is able to evidently boost the access performance of the SSD.